Self-Mock

[dpaul007.livejournal.com]

(cross-posted to my own journal)

Background: I'm 38, I've been doing tech support since 1986 (before the INTARWEB!) and my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I -- in 1979. Ergo, I know my stuff.

So I get to work this morning, settle into my cube and power up the various machines so I can start the day.

My desktop machine halts after POST and tells me, "NTLDR not found. Press any key to restart." Uh oh. I press the "any" key (you call it a space bar) and get the same error. I repeat the process. Same error. Shit.

I run through some basic troubleshooting to no avail. I can't open the box to check on loose connections, so I dutifully report the outage to my team lead and hardware guru.

Then, I prepare myself for a day of hell since I'll be doing everything on my laptop -- I hate my laptop anyway, so this is going to be teh suck.

During my first call from a user, I'm waiting for her to finish a task, so I am staring at my desktop PC just wondering what else I can do to fix this. And a flash of pure, unadulterated SOOOPER-GEEENIUSSSS hits me.

I pulled the 3.5" disk out of the a: drive and rebooted.