Friday, October 13, 2006
Fortune Vomits on My Eiderdown Again
Hmm. For someone who has a remarkable lack of superstition, I’m having an hilariously ghastly Friday 13th (I suspect the hand, or possibly tentacle, of Cuddly Cthulhu). First, however, I should mention there’s an Avengers repeat with lots of spies-and-doubles-related fun at 11.30 tonight, which I’ve not as yet reviewed but would recommend (note for your diary: next week’s is unseasonal but unmissable). This relates to comedy misfortune number one, my strong right arm. Well, OK, it’s usually my wimpish right arm, but today it’s an entertaining mixture of ‘numb’ and ‘agonising’, due to a recurring nerve problem flaring up. So that’s rather slowed my typing, and means pain from the neck down. Woo hoo! But that’s not all. My ISP chose today to go down for seven hours, so by early afternoon I was so frustrated and in such discomfort that I took some painkillers and went to bed, in the hope that after half an hour’s sleep my Internet connection might be restored or at least my arm more useful. Within 20 seconds of my head touching the pillow, however, our burglar alarm had gone off, along with every other one in the block. This was because the power cut had tripped them all.
Seriously, I’m not making this up.
So, they went on for a good hour, in a sort of symphony, and I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep. But eventually power came back on, and the alarms stopped, and even our steam-powered dial-up connection made an effort to reconnect rather than merely re-route the steam out of my ears. Of course, I still found any significant typing was livid agony, so I decided to do something useful with my Internet connection that I could mainly operate with my left hand. No, steady on. I thought, ‘Lots of things are going wrong, and I’ve just had an e-mail to say my virus scan thingy is out of date. That’s asking for trouble, isn’t it? Why don’t I buy the upgrade?’
It turns out that the answer to that question is in fact ‘Because it’ll uninstall your old one, which means Outlook will lose the .dlls associated with it and you’ll be then unable to open it and all your e-mails with it, even after an hour and a half of tinkering with the bleeding ‘not responding’ thing.’ But the Royal Mail hasn’t bollocksed anything up that I noticed today, so that’s a plus.
So, The Avengers, then…
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Seriously, I’m not making this up.
So, they went on for a good hour, in a sort of symphony, and I didn’t get a huge amount of sleep. But eventually power came back on, and the alarms stopped, and even our steam-powered dial-up connection made an effort to reconnect rather than merely re-route the steam out of my ears. Of course, I still found any significant typing was livid agony, so I decided to do something useful with my Internet connection that I could mainly operate with my left hand. No, steady on. I thought, ‘Lots of things are going wrong, and I’ve just had an e-mail to say my virus scan thingy is out of date. That’s asking for trouble, isn’t it? Why don’t I buy the upgrade?’
It turns out that the answer to that question is in fact ‘Because it’ll uninstall your old one, which means Outlook will lose the .dlls associated with it and you’ll be then unable to open it and all your e-mails with it, even after an hour and a half of tinkering with the bleeding ‘not responding’ thing.’ But the Royal Mail hasn’t bollocksed anything up that I noticed today, so that’s a plus.
So, The Avengers, then…
