Love/hate

The computers at work and I have a love/hate relationship. They love to piss me off, and I hate them because of it.

I work voluntarily for a charity organisation where I serve on the management committee, something I've really enjoyed doing for the last two-and-a-half years. I go into the office on average once a month for meetings and general bits-and-pieces. More often than not I hang around in the office after the meeting to do bits and pieces that need doing. I was determined that tonight wouldn't be one of those nights. I should have known that such determination was tempting fate.

The meeting finished uncharacteristically early at 5,20 pm. I accompanied a colleague down to her car, had a smoke, and then headed back up to the office to find some files on the computer so that I could email them to myself at home to be worked on. I turned everything off and locked up, headed down stairs, lit up another cigarette, and remembered that I had forgotten something. I had promised another colleague that I'd grab a copy of our brochure, take it home and scan it and then email it to her so that she could update it. I finished the cigarette and realised it would probably be easier if I found the original file on the computer and emailed that instead of taking the time to scan/type it from the hard copy. I headed back upstairs, unlocked everything, and sat down at the computer. It was 5,45 pm. It's at this point were my tale takes a turn for the worst.

When I turned the computer on I noticed that the antivirus needed updating. Being the IT Officer, Second Class (the aforementioned colleague is the IT Officer, First Class) I figured I may as well update it while I'm there or it wouldn't get done for a few weeks seeing as how we don't visit the office often. I searched for the brochure and found quite a few different files, so I noted where they were saved and decided to email them all off since they would likely all contribute to the you-beaut revamped super-brochure we had in mind. It's at this point where things go from really wrong.

I started emailing files off, only small ones to begin with and the poor dial-up connection chugged along studiously. I started a spybot scan while I was waiting for them to send, since it likely hasn't been done in a while and adware has always been a problem on the office computers. I soon realised that the files I really wanted, the ones that looked most useful, were in the order of 20MB a piece. I opened up winRAR and compressed them down a more manageable (but still too big for sending with a dial-up connection). I broke the files up a bit into 1MB pieces, but then realised I would still need to send twenty emails. I didn't have a flash drive with me and there are no blank CDs in the office. I went downstairs to see if the newsagent down the road was still open (it was) but halfway there realised I could just use some floppy disks.

So I went back upstairs again, grabbed the box of blank floppies and sat down to attempt to copy the 1MB files to the floppies. The first one was the wrong size. The second was corrupt. The third had an unknown error. The fourth worked. The fifth had an unknown error. It was getting a little ridiculous. I looked through the draw for a blank disk but only found a spindle of blank DVDs that are used for backup. Being desperate, I put in a blank DVD (4GB capacity for 40MB of files is totally ludicrous, but it was nearly 7 pm at this point and I was regretting starting the whole exercise). The burning had errors.

I gave up.

I went home.