how to really, really, hate your genetic predispositions.

[kaigou]

Especially if you've got the chromosone that says "will automatically have the HARDEST FRICKIN TIME when it comes to electrical systems". I'm talking everything from Kaypro to Compaq to Apple, and every operating system from MS-Dos 1.0 through Windows NT, from Apple's first release through the first Mac up to Leopard 10.5, all the way back to the world of CPM, Pascal and Cobol. Considering I (accidentally) created a virus in Fortran that infected nearly every program on the university's terminal system, the past two weeks shouldn't surprise me.

Frustrate me, but not surprise me.

And thus, I bring you: HOW TO GET A NEW COMPUTER RUNNING... IF YOU'RE ME. Have alcohol handy.

DAY ONE

1. Stall on new purchase for about three years.
   
2. Decide on purchase.
   
3. Make purchase.
   
4. Bring computer home and set it up on shiny-clean spot of precedence on desk.
   
5. Admire for a few minutes. (This is important step!)
   
6. Hook up to old laptop.
   
7. Begin setup/migration assistant.
   
8. Wonder why you're not being asked to enter anything new.
   
9. When migration assistant completes, discover you've converted over a whole bunch of files and programs that don't work with Intel-based environment, that are leftover from deleted programs, or generally override new system setup.
   
10. Then discover the new computer's three IDs -- computer, user, and hard drive -- are all identical to the original laptop.
    
11. Fuss. (This means the two systems will show up like they're duplicates on the network -- which theo is which? -- and when hooked together, the hard drive listing will show both hard drives named... theo.)
    
12. Change hard drive name. Appears successful.
    
13. Reboot.
    
14. Change computer name. Appears...
    
15. Mac has sudden blue-screen attack. Obviously that was "not successful".
    
16. Reboot.
    
17. Change user name. All files disappear.
    
18. Reboot. Still no files.
    
19. Pour a drink.
    
20. Reboot. Still no luck.
    
21. Have two more drinks and call the help line.
    
22. Discover you're not even on the latest installation; the computer was manufactured pre-Leopard, and you need to upgrade.
    
23. End up doing close-to-full reinstallation just to get new user name different from original computer, even if HD name remains the same.
    
24. Call it a day.

DAY THREE

1. Crash Mail.
   
2. Reopen mail, and get bizarre error messages.
   
3. Call help.
   
4. Fuss -- quietly but firmly -- when told it was "probably a corrupted file" from the original laptop, and the only thing to do is a full reinstallation.
   
5. Insist on talking to someone who might know more.
   
6. Agree to wait on hold.
   
7. Keep waiting.
   
8. Keep waiting.
   
9. Wonder if you'll be on hold long enough to run to the grocery store for more alcohol.
   
10. Keep waiting.
    
11. Start to wish you had gone ahead and gone to the grocery store.
    
12. Forty-five minutes and no email later, get someone with some kind of a clue.
    
13. Go through the entire mail setup and learn all sorts of nifty obscure things about the OS.
    
14. End up pretty much reinstalling (sort of) the Mail program.
    
15. Agree to keep prog crippled for a few days to make sure the clean-up "took".

DAY SIX

1. Hit the roof when for the sixteenth time, Mail refuses to move "junk mail" in the "junk mail" box but insists it belongs in the "friends" box.
   
2. Start frothing when Mail won't follow roughly half the listed rules in its preferences.
   
3. Start burning CD/DVD backups of everything you'd spent two days putting on the computer in hopes of enjoying a monster-drive that could store it all at once without requiring you flip through twenty-something CDs to find one stupid archive file.

DAY SEVEN

1. Keep burning archive disks.
   
2. Reflect on that moment of happy admiration.
   
3. Wonder what happened to it.
   
4. Remember what happened to it was YOUR FAMILY HERITAGE.
   
5. Pour another drink.

DAY NINE

1. Give up and do clean reinstall, from scratch.
   
2. Watch progression of 250-gig disk get erased and reinstalled from scratch... over two hours.
   
3. Start on upgrade to current system... and discover the HD retains the same -- that is, same as laptop's -- name.
   
4. Call the help line.
   
5. Attempt to be civil despite gritted teeth.
   
6. Remind yourself that this runs in your family.
   
7. Remind yourself that your father was the first person to blue-screen a doorstop Mac.
   
8. Remind yourself that you have never sat down at a computer -- any computer -- and not blue-screened it within the first twenty-four hours. Or green-screened, on the Kaypro 16.
   
9. Politely entertain the help-guy while you wait for the "erase disk" action to complete.
   
10. Discover you just erased the entire operating system, too, so...
    
11. Start over on full installation.
    
12. Complete first OS installation.
    
13. Confirm HD name is now different from laptop's.
    
14. Cheer.
    
15. Do registration step.
    
16. Enter all relevant information, including user name and "nickname".
    
17. Reboot.
    
18. Start upgrade to latest version.
    
19. Try to stay awake.
    
20. Complete main upgrade.
    
21. Reboot.
    
22. Do additional package upgrade/patches.
    
23. Stare at the apparently unmoving progress bar... for an hour.
    
24. Download latest patches and install.
    
25. Reboot.
    
26. Discover the "completely new" computer has a file for "Old Library" -- that is, information carried over from the previous installation(s) -- y'know, the one that was ostensibly completely WIPED!?
    
27. Discover the computer's name is not, in fact, the computer name you requested, but "name's computer" which is sort of like me saying I want to call my dog Odetta and discovering the vet's paperwork all says "Odetta's Dog".
    
28. Stare in bewilderment at how the username is identical to the hard drive's name.
    
29. Wonder where-the-bloody-hell is the username you'd entered.
    
30. Call the help desk.
    
31. Listen to their recording about how it's after hours.
    
32. Hang up.
    
33. Pour yourself a drink.
    
34. Take a deep breath.
    
35. Grab the nearest, biggest, baddest-ass damn frickin MAGNET you can find, and wave it ov

---

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Comments

[elanivalae.livejournal.com]

This makes me want to print it out and give it to the Mac salesguy at our company the next time I have to listen to his twenty-minute high-decibel pitch about how easy these are to set up. xD

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

They're very easy to set up... UNLESS YOU'RE ME.

This is actually nothing compared to what I went through every time I got a new PC... it's just that it takes a helluva lot longer to erase/format/install/etc on a hard drive with 200+ gig than a hard drive that's only 1/400th the size.

[elanivalae.livejournal.com]

Nah, I hear the store side of phone calls about stuff like this all the time. xD I don't think your experience is all that unusual.

Not that it makes it any more fun, I'm sure. :/

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Not being anyone else, I couldn't say whether anyone else goes through stuff like crashing their new Compaq five times in the first two days of owning, or spending the first week on the phone with Gateway, or once ending up on a five-way conference call with techs from Microsoft while they tried to figure out why my three computers seemed to be the only ones in existence that weren't working with the usual drive-sharing setup... but I can say this kind of conversation is normal for me, with a new computer.

Me: I'm calling because I want to know why it tells me I don't have permissions. I *am* the Network Admin for this computer, why does it say I can't do something?
Tech: What were you trying to do?
Me: Well, uhm, customize stuff.
Tech: Like...?
Me: Uh, I wanted to change the name of the "Applications" folder.
Tech: ...
Me: And, uh, it wouldn't let me.
Tech: *with peculiar slightly strangled tone* Ahem, well, see, the way the OS is set up, some names are hardcoded, so unfortunately you can't change everything. That's just a limit of the OS.
Me: Bummer. So there's no way to change it, at all?
Tech: No. Sorry. I'm still not clear on the reasons for changing it, though.
Me: Oh, just to see if I could.
Tech: ...

A little knowledge may be a dangerous thing, but trust me, my family's proof that a whole lotta knowledge is a damn sight more dangerous, at least to tech-teams' sanities.

[branchandroot]

So much sympathy.

Computers think they're smarter than us.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

The sad thing is... sometimes they are. Sigh.

[sans-pertinence.livejournal.com]

COBOL. *sniggers uncontrollably* And, infinite blue screen of death=total fail. Yes.

Grab the nearest, biggest, baddest-ass damn frickin MAGNET you can find, and wave it ov

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAckcoughngh... yeah. Sorry. More than halfway drunk, here. But you have my complete and utter sympathy. May I suggest more alcohol?

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Believe me, I have been imbibing happily, although this may have slowed down the conversion process, it's still made it funner! Haven't yet converted over my address book, but everything else seems to be (finally) falling into place.

Yes... COBOL. *dies*

[taithe.livejournal.com]

You accidentally created a virus? *intrigued*

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly sure what else to call it, honestly. I wrote a program that was an attempt at Eliza (that is, a system that parses a user's entry and produces a response based on recognizing keywords) -- I think it was something to do with the upcoming election, in a very generalized kid-awareness-level of politics, but hey. Anyway, after uploading it from the terminal to the main system... it started showing up in everything.

I didn't even realize it -- I only knew that there were errors when I'd run the program, and I and some classmates were trying to figure out what was going on... and then I heard some grad student (I should mention that I was 9yrs old at the time, and my classmates were mostly high school students) hollering about why was some question about President Carter showing up in his output?

Err, whoops. Over the next week or two (while I kept trying to fix the code in the original program and never did find an error), my dad reported more and more folks saying snippets of my stupid little program were showing up in their programs. Including the school's primordial registrar system, cripes, someone's inputting student info and suddenly they get some silly response-line from my program, and yet every time the program would keep running as though this 'imported' code was just fine & not cause for seeing an error.

It was very bizarre, and moreso when I finally deleted the entire program. No more problems were reported after that, and I never did figure out how it happened.

[no-ron.livejournal.com]

>>>Considering I (accidentally) created a virus in Fortran that infected nearly every program on the university's terminal system
aaaaahahahahhaaaa!!!! :)))) you rule!!

it's very possible that the first wrong step was deciding to use the "migration assistant"..

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

(See reply to Taithe, above.)

Hah, yeah, well the migration assistant seemed like a good idea at the time, but I found it annoying in the end. It wasn't like I could pick this, this, and that, and skip the rest. It's really an all-or-nothing for newbs. Sigh.

[kraehe.livejournal.com]

What no_ron said. Sorry!

Sigh... We're dealing with my parents, who have been on ancient (hand-me-down) machines and a dialup connection until now, so she did very limited web-surfing. Now they have a new machine and Fios. Last night she called asking all sorts of questions that couldn't be answered over the phone -- we'll have to actually go there to fix things in person -- and I also had to talk her out of buying WordPerfect off of Ebay for $29 (Mom, those deals are usually illegal copies, and may have viruses as well. And be VERY CAREFUL where you use your credit card online. And, oh, you should get a PayPal account with a SecureKey). Ugh. I wish she was still on dialup.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Hahahaha, NEVER AGAIN. I had to deal with two years of my mom learning Wordstar

"Honey, how do I print again?"
"Use the Print menu, mom!"
"The what?"
"Control-K, Mom. Then P, then U, then R."
"What?"
"MOOOOOMMMMM. LOOK AT THE NOTES NEXT TO THE MONITOR."
"Ohhh! That's handy!"

...the cheatsheets for my mom were actually the first documentation I ever wrote.

[kraehe.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah...

Mom & Dad's most recent computer was bought for them by my brother-in-law (middle sister's hubby). He hasn't learned yet :D

[ktoth04.livejournal.com]

awwwwwwwwwwwww
that sux D:

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

Ah, it's all part of the game. ;-)

If I didn't find humor in the disasters in my life, I'd never have anything to laugh about.

[ktoth04.livejournal.com]

You could laugh at my friend... lol, he got pooped on today >.> silly birds.... i laughed :D

[sevenall.livejournal.com]

You've got to make place for booze runs on those lists...

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

...and buy more than just one or two bottles at a time. Make the run WORTH it, y'know?