Never let it be said that life is not full of surprises. It’s a little after ten o’clock at night, and I’m the last place I expected to be: at work. Not actually working, of course, but hunched over the keyboard in my office while outside in the hall, floor polishers whir and janitors talk amongst themselves from one end of the corridor to the other. See, at home, my computer crashed. I tried to upload some rinky-dink midi conversion software, because I can’t actually play any instruments but I have these other songs stuck in my head and I’ve been trying to figure out which notes I’ve been humming lately. After much trouble, I ended up restarting my computer, and I wound up with error messages across my screen telling me that I need to reinstall Windows. I came here to try and find a boot disk, because I am apparently too stupid to have made one for my own use, and because everything else Dell tech support suggested failed to work or get me beyond “Error Starting Program” and an otherwise empty desktop. But all I have here is the Windows 2000 CD, and while creating a boot disk from that probably isn’t terribly complicated, it’s getting late, I don’t need to use my home computer tonight, and I have no blank disks handy, it would seem. Besides, I think the janitors are getting restless.
I will say this much: technical support can be awful, as recent experience has taught me, but the guy on the phone at Dell was friendly and courteous, and their menu was intuitive and easy to navigate. That’s important when you’re in Panic Mode, like I was when I first called. When they don’t have the information you need, or can’t fix the problems you’re facing, it’s at least nice to know it isn’t because they don’t care.