PC woes
Grandad July 19th, 2008
I got an email the other day.
A company had been trying to collect the balance on an outstanding account, and they wrote an apologetic letter to say that there were insufficient funds in my Mastercard.
This didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was that that account lasted so long. There must have been a lot of cash in it at the beginning.
So I gave them the details for Jeanette Pasquale of Bordeaux, which is an account I haven’t used before.
That worked very nicely, and they wrote to say they were mailing me the details, and that it was very important that I print off that mail for my records.
The mail duly arrived, and then I went to print it.
I must explain my setup. You see, I have a junk room an office where my broadband comes in the window. That is where I have my printer. I also have an old PC that I found in a skip, and the printer is connected to that. So that PC has to be running, before I can print anything off my laptop.
I went in and gave the PC a kick, as that is the way to get it to work. I then went back to my armchair and waited.
I heard the PC whirring away, and it gave the loud beep that means it is nearly ready. I usually give it another minute or so before I try to print, so I waited. It gave another loud beep. That shouldn’t happen. I waited and it beeped again. This was getting annoying.
I hauled myself out of the armchair and went into the junk room office to see what was going on.
The PC was starting up nicely, but as soon as it got as far as showing something on the screen, it would switch itself off and on again and start the whole process from scratch.
Fuck.
I kicked it a couple of times, but that didn’t have any noticeable effect. This was getting serious.
I rooted around, and found a CD in my candle collection [an upside-down CD is great for standing candles on, as it casts all sorts of pretty lights around the room]. I scraped the wax off and stuffed it in the PC.
That seemed to do something, as the next thing it asked me if I wanted to repair my PC. I said yes, of course, so it churned for a bit and then printed ‘C:>’ on the screen. That’s all. Just ‘C:>’. What the fuck use is that?
I tried typing in a few things, like ‘fix windows’ and ‘repair windows’ and ‘fuck you, you shit’ but none of it worked. So I removed the CD and kicked the PC again.
The PC went back to launching itself again, but this time, it did something different. It went into a routine where it claimed it was fixing things. What the hell? I left it to it.
A few minutes later, it started making those noises that sounded like programmes loading, so I went back in to see what was going on. The little bollix was working perfectly!
I printed off the email.
I gave the PC a last kick for luck, and it switched off.
I will never understand these things. Why does a PC work, and then not work? Even more importantly, why does a PC not work, and then work? It doesn’t make sense.
Nothing makes sense these days.
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