My frustration level has been very high over the last several days, but this morning I am typing on a brand new laptop. Finally.
This tale began last Wednesday morning when I sat down, opened up the laptop, pushed the power button, and nothing happened. Nothing.
I thought perhaps it had come unplugged, and the battery had died. I checked the plug. It was plugged into the outlet just as it should have been. So I decided something must be wrong with the outlet. A lamp was plugged into that same outlet and was working fine, but I guess I thought that maybe half of the outlet had gone bad??!!
In any event, I connected the computer cord to a different outlet, but it still didn't work. I told Al about my dilemma and he set about trying to find a solution. He's really good at finding solutions for seemingly impossible problems, but even he couldn't make this laptop work. He had a universal power cord that he connected to the laptop. That didn't help.
The computer's cord had one of those transformer boxes in the middle, which normally would have a green light on it. The light was out, so we, meaning Al, decided it must be a problem with the power cord.
We got ourselves ready and headed down to Asheville to let the Geek Squad solve the problem. When we got there and the Geek Squad technician plugged the cord in, sparks flew! He immediately unplugged the cord, examined it, and discovered that the cord had been cut. This is likely due to a run-in with the Roomba, our robot vacuum cleaner, although we can't know that for certain.
My best techno-dummy explanation of what happened is that this compromised cord caused the "transformer box" on the cord to burn up and also caused a fire inside the computer which burned up the mother board (whatever that is!). That's the bad news.
The good news is that all this "fire in the computer" did not burn the house down! And it could have.
More good news is that the Geek Squad was able to recover the data from the old, burned-up computer and transfer it to the new one which we purchased Wednesday morning.
We made our purchase and left the new laptop with the Geeks so they could make the data transfer. At least, at that point, we were hopeful that they would be able to, but we didn't know that for certain when we left.
The Geek Squad technician had told us that this kind of transfer would usually be completed within 48 hours. So, my mind automatically built that into my schedule.
Al was headed to Seattle on Thursday, which gave me three days at home alone. I had planned to use those days for writing, specifically planning to make a lot of progress on the book I'm working on. On Thursday, I accomplished quite a bit, even though I had to write everything by hand. That left me with a very tired hand! As a result of that very tired hand, Friday was much less productive.
On Friday I waited all day for a phone call to tell me to come pick up my laptop. The call never came. Something else to add to the bad news category. And it didn't come on Saturday either. I checked the status of my order on Friday night and learned it was "taking longer than expected." That had me a little worried. I hadn't backed the old computer up recently, and I was really concerned I was going to lose a lot of data. Meaning a lot of work on that book would be gone.
Lesson learned. Back-up more frequently.
All my carefully laid plans went out the window. I made lots of scribbled notes, which hopefully I'll be able to read and decipher this week.
The really good news of this whole story - beyond the fact that the house didn't burn down - is that I have a new laptop in hand (picked it up yesterday afternoon on our way home from church), the data transfer was successful, and there's a new week ahead of me with lots of time available to accomplish the tasks I had planned for last week.
The other really good news is the reminder of what I knew to be true, but had once again forgotten. I'm really not in charge. Of anything!
God is in control.
"The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps." (Proverbs 16:9 ESV)
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