George, how COULD you?

George is my recently acquired Acer Aspire One laptop. (Hell, yes, I'm naming names. :)

George and I, I THOUGHT, were friends. We've been hanging out together nearly every day, working on Raoul and Aardvark and some days both, and we check the occasional email and do the occasional "we should be working but we don't wanna" random Internet search.

Today was Raoul re-reading day. I finished the editing on Tuesday, let it rest yesterday, and today I started reviewing it top to bottom to make sure I hadn't done anything weird. (like the "smile of pure belief" I wrote instead of the intended "disbelief" which does make for a rather different sentence)

I worked for two hours this morning and I did GOOD stuff. I found a bunch of little things here and there that needed to be changed, and I changed them. George and I were on fire.

Perhaps George was literally on fire, because at 2:00pm I pressed "Save" (I never quite trust Microsoft Word so I save CONSTANTLY to make sure nothing goes missing) and George said, "I'm disinclined to acquiesce to your suggestion." (Actually, he said something about the drive being missing, but a good Pirates of the Caribbean quote is never a mistake.)

I said, "!!!" and Word shut down.

Okay, fine, I'll just re-open the file and...

OH. The file is not there. The file has in fact been erased from the drive.

Then I said a few other things that cannot be posted here.

Then I stomped around.

Then I phoned Mr. W (who, lucky for him, was in a meeting) and told him I planned to do myself and the computer some serious damage and he might want to call back before it happened.

(He still hasn't called. :)

To make a long and infuriating story short, I eventually got Word to admit that a) it had a temp file and b) the stuff was there, and I lost maybe two or three minutes of work.

Unfortunately, my fury at the computer for just dying for no apparent reason did not exactly leave me in a calm and rational state of mind that would be conducive for editing. I even ate two squares of chocolate (if it's good enough to help Harry Potter recover from disaster, it's good enough for me - and I DID track its calories) but no good.

So I thought, how to calm myself? Where can I pour out all this annoyance and blinding rage?

:)

Now, feeling a little calmer, I shall return to work. Not on George, though. When a man jerks you around that bad, he don't deserve no second chances.