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More millage

19 08 09 - 21:40 and angry miles at that.

See, some miles are happy, like you're driving to Disney World. Doesn't matter how far, they are happy miles. Some miles are sad, like you are driving to a tax audit. Could be half a mile, but it's the saddest you'll ever know. Other miles are just angry miles.

See, here I pull up to my 9:30 who is supposed to be out of town and leaving me a laptop. But no, she is there, piling into a car with the possible intent to go somewhere. "Guess I'm here after all!" Yes, good thing people are so good at pointing out the obvious, I never would have guessed. So I take said laptop and instead of taking a look at it right there for awhile and going to my next one a few miles away, I leave right then so she can get out. So I'm early to my next one.

He's getting a Mac, he says. So why am I bothering to look at this crappy PC laptop? But anyway, I finish that up.

Then I go take back one of the systems I had worked on and get that stuff going. Naturally it isn't as easy as just plugging it back in and saying 'here you go" but part of it was my fault for not paying enough attention to the window system Windows uses which got me screwed up a bit.

Here come the angry miles. I now proceed to drive BACK to the street I just was, from #40 to #57. Yes, independently, two people from the same street called me to make appointments on the same day. Of course, they couldn't be scheduled together, now could they? Anyway, this one is bork-borked. BSOD on boot, gee, haven't seen that before. Amazing that software can cause a fault only hardware can cause on the Mac. You don't get Macs kernel panicking left and right, do you? But sneeze next to a PC and it BSODs on you. Obviously this has happened before, because he is booting from a WINXP folder rather then a WINDOWS folder, a technique I use to avoid wiping a machine out and losing everything. Windows gets installed fresh, their documents remain intact, the world goes on. So now he has a WINXP2 folder on top of that. Sadly, messing with this machine has eaten up all the time I was ahead earlier, so by the time I get home to get the other machine I need to drop off and arrive at the final 5:00 destination, it's now 5:25.

"Oh, I called you about ten minutes ago."
"Really? I'll be sure to listen to it when I get home."

I mean, really. Think for a moment people. You have a 5:00 appointment with someone. Yes, if you are first in line, say 9:30, and I haven't arrived by 10:00 you can begin to think something's wrong. But when you have the last time slot of the day, consider that I just might be running behind and have a little patience. I'm a busy guy, and you getting your computer back twenty minutes later is not going to knock the Earth off orbit and into space. Yes, I try to be on time, not early and not late. I do. But sometimes that doesn't work out, and coming home to "we had a 5:00" doesn't help anyone.

Then worked on the two laptops a bit I have around here. Made phone calls. Dinner. The one crappy P3 laptop the guy dropped off overheats because the fan is dead. Whoops. So I'm backing his HD up as I type this. Even if I could get at it to replace it, the machine is like 10 years old, how would I even find one? Steve Jobs had the right idea from the start- make the machine run cool enough that it doesn't NEED a fan. Or make the person using the machine into a big enough fan that... little joke there.

Six calls tonight. One right after another when I tried to make them. I sat down thinking "oh, I only have three to do? Thank goodness. Started to dial the first number, three times, but every time it was "all circuits are busy now". Meaning from the time I hit the dial button and my computer tried to dial out, (nine seconds, for those curious) someone called. Three times. In a row. I was getting very perturbed. By the fourth time I was like "can I please make a call now?"

And the DVD just finished verifying. So at least his data is safe.

At least three tomorrow, maybe four. No Oblivion tonight, I guess. Have to do a comic. I wanted to get it both penciled and colored, but I don't think that's happening. Sleepy. Is it Sunday yet?

Current Sleepiness: 6/10