Friday, May 13, 2011

Trouble with a Capital "T"!

I've never had this happen to me before but with the issues Blogger had yesterday, it seems they deleted posts put up on May 12th. It just so happens this post was written and published on May 12th (originally) and today, I discovered it had been deleted by Blogger. Lucky for me, I still had it on my reader so I did a paste and copy and here it is, back to life again! Thanks to those other bloggers who commented on Facebook that this error of Blogger's had happened or I never would have known my post had been obliterated!

Two questions here for you tonight.

First, have you ever seen the musical, "The Music Man" and if so, do you remember the song in that production that details how having a pool hall in River City means trouble and that trouble is with a "Capital T?" If so, then that may give you a tiny bit of an inkling that I didn't have the best of days yesterday.

And my second question is this: Have you ever witnessed the black screen of death on your computer monitor?

If so, then you'll probably understand completely why I was worried sick all afternoon yesterday, convinced I was going to have to go and apply for what I refer to as a "small business loan" or at the very least, find some places to go for some personal loans.

The problem I experienced began when Mandy and Ken decided they were going to power wash the deck on the back of the house, along with the siding all over the house too. Sounded like a reasonable idea to me until when they plugged the darned thing in and it blew a circuit breaker.

Well, initially I didn't think too much about the blown circuit breaker, cause that does happen every now and again -not frequently, ya know -but every now and again and yesterday, when it happened and the tv shut off, I figured it will all be okay as soon as they get the thing plugged in someplace where it will work okay for them.

However, I didn't realize it immediately that the blown circuit breaker was the item that was responsible for the black screen of death that was then appearing on my monitor! Hmmm. How can this be happening to me?

Because I am not a rocket scientist nor am I a computer engineer type person, my initial reaction was to go and tell my son's girlfriend -who is pretty adept about computer stuff -and she told me it sounded like I might have fried my computer!

Say what? Here I was thinking that it was some kind of issue with the monitor because there was nothing showing on the screen and the blue light on the was coming on so that told ME that the computer was working, just not the monitor but Elizabeth informed me it was actually just the reverse. She said the monitor is probably okay but the tower -probably not so much!

Sheesh! That's when my stomach really began to churn big time and the nerves came out of the closet where they've been hiding since the last time my computer went nutso-wonky on me by picking up a really horrid and nasty virus last summer. I was on the verge of, as my son so sweetly put it in a Facebook post, suffering through the "D.T's!"

But I finally pulled myself together and phoned a friend who lives on the street up the hill and behind our place and who also just so happens to be a bit of a computer geek/guru and within ten minutes he was here, gathered up my tower and took it home to have a good old "look about" at the innards of my computer.

Figuring I might be in for a long siege of computer withdrawal while our friend was working on my sweet baby computer, I got in touch with my ex-son-in-law who had "borrowed" my old computer and asked him if he would please bring it home to me when he came home from work tonight. He said no problem to that and about 7 p.m. or so, he dropped the old computer off on my desk.

Then I took one look at that tower and the mess of wires and such that all got plugged in someplace in the back of a computer and my stomach began churning all over again.

I didn't have clue one as to where any of these wires should go on my old computer and from what I could see, I had the sinking feeling that I wouldn't be able to hook up my old computer using the cables and such laying in an ugly black, tangled up mass on my desk because one thing I didn't see on the back of the old computer were any little USB ports! And I could see plain as day that a lot of these wires and cable and such also came supplied with just that -a USB port thingy to be inserted in of course, a USB port.

So I phoned my geek/guru friend and told him I had the old computer but couldn't make heads or tails out of this mess of stuff laying on my desk to be hooked up somewhere. So he said not to panic because he would be over in about 10 minutes or so to oversee things.

And much to my surprise, when he did arrive in yes, about ten minutes, he also came carrying in my lovely sweet baby computer, all healed and ready to be hooked up in a jiffy and fired up then, ready for me to use it until the next time -hopefully never -it breaks down again!

Seems the computer was pretty much in need of a very healthy dusting out inside and everything came back to life, nice as can be!

Thank goodness. Tragedy was averted for me. And trust me, a sick, broken computer to me spells Trouble with a capital "T"!

5 comments:

Maggie May said...

I am really pleased that it had a happy ending. I get so upset by anything like this.
I have had a problem with Blogger all day and couldn't leave comments or check my own. Hopefully that has righted itself now, else I wouldn't have known what to do.
Maggie X

Nuts in May

Dianne said...

we blow circuit breaker the way the Republicans cut taxes for the rich - all the time!! ;)

everything is pligged into super duper surge protectors since my son is power wash crazed

glad it was just dust

I love "The Music Man" :)

Suldog said...

The Music Man is one of my all-time favorites.

(Shhhhh! Don't spread it around. I'll be drummed out of the heavy metal brotherhood.)

terri said...

So THAT'S what happened with Blogger! I was going to try to catch up on some of my reading yesterday, finally, and tried to leave comments only to get a message saying Blogger was down. Then I went back today to try to comment on some of the posts I had seen yesterday and found they were gone.

Travis Cody said...

Blogger has a whole explanation and apology on the Blogger Status sight. I was kind of annoyed for awhile, but then I realized that they'll either fix it or they won't, and there isn't anything I can do about it either way!

As to the black screen of death, or BSOD, I have had it before and it's very skeery!