Okay, so I just spent the last three hours in computer hell. Yep, on my first official day of blissful unemployment, I nearly saw my life flash before my eyes.
It all start a few days ago, when I noticed my mouse was acting weird, not responding. I knew I had to make the dreaded trip to Radio Shack and buy a replacement. Of course, the model I’d had was no longer in production so I had to buy the new and improved version. The new and improved always makes me a bit leery. I guess I’m just a little set in my ways but frankly, I don’t understand the obsession to build the better mousetrap – or mouse as the case may be. My view is, if it’s not broken and it works, why improve it? And who gets to decide if it really is in fact, improved? I digress.
So, I buy the new mouse and the new and improved part starting bugging me. It has this thing called auto scroll which means the wheel is utterly useless and apparently is just there for show. You have to click the scroll button and this lameass icon pops up and then you move the mouse up and down to get the scroll thing happening. Me no likey.
So, I got annoyed with it and continued to get annoyed with it, so I whipped the cheapo mouse I bought for the laptop and stuck that baby in. It worked okay, but it’s a bit on the small side. Anyway, blame it on the two glasses of wine I had tonight but I really started getting steamed with logitech and their new and improved and I decided to uninstall the software for the logitech mouse, since I wasn’t using a logitech mouse, I was using a cheapie no name mouse, and what’s the diff?
And off I went, wildly uninstalling useless software for a useless mouse. I had to restart the computer as we all know, in order to change the settings. Which I did.
I plugged in el cheapo and then boom, no mouse action. I mean, NO mouse action. I panicked – so much so that I asked Roomie for his assistance (forget the fact that he’d had way more than my two glasses of wine) and we spent hours trying this and that, constantly unplugging and replugging, rebooting and generally tearing out our already thinning hair. Not a pretty site. Not pretty at all. In fact, I started seeing odd shapes and funny colors. I heard voices sneering at me and frankly, I didn’t feel at all well.
Finally, Roomie wandered back to the livingroom to his movie and Jack Daniels and I stayed at the computer. My life is on this damned thing – at least that which means anything (read manuscripts, stories, poetry, blog posts, yikes!) so I was pretty invested in solving the problem. I even contemplated calling the IT from the doc’s office and paying him his bagillion bucks an hour to fix it if it was really too much of mess.
So, I realized that the problem really began when I uninstalled the dumbass software, so through painstaking hit and miss, using keyboard shortcuts and the tab button, I finally managed to reinstall the darn stuff.
But when I rebooted, I still had the el cheapo plugged in and it wouldn’t work. My fingernails were starting to look awfully tasty and frankly, I had very little hair left to pull out. So, just for the hell of it, I plugged in the damned logitech and rebooted.
Eureka! We have meeses once again. I guess I learned my lesson – You can’t fight progress and quit fricking uninstalling shit. Sometimes it matters.