quislibet | Maschinenaufstand

That subject header is dedicated to

damiel.

It would depress me greatly were I to figure exactly how many hours have been lost in the last two weeks dealing with escalating and chain-reacting hardware and software problems (*), all while trying to meet a deadline. This has in fact been true separately both at home and at work, although there is no interconnection, unless I am myself some kind of computer virus carrier and can transmit it through my fingertips into the keyboard or mouse, an interesting cyberpunk notion, perhaps, but not one that cheers me.

Today: setting up new printer, necessitated by death of old printer. I've already had to reinstall the printer software four times. In the end, I have gone back to printing on a co-worker's printer over the network and will worry about what's up with the new printer when (a little late) I have met the deadline here.

-----

(*) For example, in tedious detail, so you might want to skip it: Last week I tried to hook up an external CD burner, which I actually need for work-related purposes (quite in addition to the fact that if I can burn CDs here I can download everything from software I need at home to MP3s with a much faster connection, throw it on a CD, take it home, and Bob's Your Uncle). It claimed to be Mac-compatible but did not in fact include any Mac software. To use it on my old-ish iMac, I had to (I was told by the CD burner people) upgrade to OS X, but then all of my old software required "Classic" support, and I had to upgrade 9.0 to 9.2, whereupon I had to reinstall printer software (for, of course, my coworker's printer, mine being broken and the new one not yet arrived), reinstall Netscape (don't ask me why exactly, but it fixed the problem I was having), and restore fonts and preferences for a host of applications. Ultimately, of course, when all was said and done, the CD burner is "not supported" by Jaguar, according to various error messages. So that's something else to sort out after the deadline, except of course I was hoping to send various massive files as a part of meeting the deadline on a freshly burned CD....