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Sunday, April 18, 2010

Bye bye baby....

Nothing causes me more anxiety than the thought of being without my computer. As a work at home mom this computer is my lifeline to the outside world and being without means I'm cut off.

I bought an HP computer when Emily was about a year old. We had it for 8 solid years before it crapped out and then even then it was fixed on the cheap by my brother and back to normal in days.
We got this computer not long after my dad died last summer. Since then we've had the power supply changed, the hard drive changed and the mother board changed. In the infinite wisdom of the dickheads at Future Shop when they changed the motherboard they neglected to input all the numbers correctly so now my computer and Windows are not recognizing one another. I have a black screen that tells me that my copy of Windows is not genuine.

As you can well see, my computer is otherwise working just fine, I can still go online, download my pics and music, my automatic updaters are even working fine. If it weren't for the fact that my computer is still under the factory warranty I'd not worry about it at all.
But since it's not going to cost me anything to have it fixed, we may as well git 'er done.

I called the fine people at HP on Thursday. My first call reached a call centre in India. My experienced documentary watching eye (ear?) told me that what I saw in Morgan Spurlock's show "30 Days" was what I was dealing with. A call centre in India, where the staff take American Accent lessons and get paid peanuts compared to US call centre employees get. Now don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with that per se. People in India need to make a living too, I have nothing against any of them (for all you who know the story of my recently being called a racist....don't get me started!!) But I had 3 - yes 3 screaming toddlers that day. The guy who I was talking to was very helpful and clearly knew how to fix my problem but I couldn't understand more than half of what he said. It could have been the crying kids, normally accents don't throw me like that, but his was thick so it made it harder and more frustrating to deal with. As it turned out I had to spend 3 hours removing all the important data (musics, pictures and documents) from my computer so that they could fix it and I had to hang up from him with my problem only semi resolved.

I called back at nap time and got an American call centre (and I know it wasn't an Indian who did well in accent training 101 because we were joking about it being tax deadline day for him.)
Long story short (ha - too late right?!) I was UPS'd a box in which to send my pretty little computer back to HP to be properly fixed and sorted out.

So, I will be left to using my mom's laptop for a week or so. And that sucks because it means no photo editing. It means not getting online as much as I'm used to and ugh, no mouse (I hate that little finger tracker mouse crap on laptops.)

But I guess it's for the best so my little connection to the outside world can last me a long time to come.

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