The music on Dell’s tech support hotline seems to change every time I call, and the uninterrupted ’80s pop of Sunday night — yes, little friends, video killed the radio star — gave way last night to some strange blend of quasi-classical elevator music, interrupted every half-minute with a “thank you for your patience” and “all our representatives are busy helping other customers.” It could have been worse; they could have been playing John Ashcroft’s greatest hits. And I suppose there are worse things to find yourself doing than deleting the contents of your hard drive and then reformatting it, but if there are, I don’t want to know about it. Typing “format c:” and hitting enter is nerve-wracking enough for one evening, thank you very much. I think I managed to salvage the more important files before the big purge, although I lost a lot of digitial photographs and some of the software I need to upload them, and I’ll need to talk to my cable modem provider about what software I need to reinstall from them, since nobody there ever sent me a CD or disk.