Down and out
In addition to being somewhat addicted to the CNN World loops (they have 6-hour segments they play over and over and over and over again) which focused exclusively on the ongoing NOLA tragedy and the 9/11 remembrance, using the wonder that is satellite technology to support my state of mind over this sad weekend, I had a few extra-special moments of technology-induced self-pity. Sunday morning I got up and, before doing anything else, turned on my computer. (Turning off my computer was the last thing I’d done at night—you can guess how close our relationship has become.) Went to put the tea on, came back and—Noooooooo!!!!Computer was sick. Very, very sick. Dead, actually. I got the flashing blue screen of death, which, infuriatingly, had a message to tell me but no matter how many times I restarted to get it, I couldn’t catch more than a few words in the .02 seconds it would appear on my screen before shutting down again. Of course, the two major projects I’d been working on all week and all day Saturday and which were both DUE on Tuesday were saved on my hard drive.
Before you call me an idiot for not backing up my files, let me say I hadn’t gotten the chance to buy blank DVDs to back them up with yet, not that it would do me much good if my computer died because no one has the programs I need to produce half this stuff for press, which is where it was supposed to be heading in anticipation of our big event where we would unveil our work. Basically, it was going to be an utter disaster professionally, on top of losing all my photos and music and diary and source of entertainment and, well, life. So I freaked out for a few hours, trying to reach someone, ANYONE, (yes, a few of you got incomprehensible phone calls at 2 am) who could tell me what to do and finally got in touch with our contracted computer consultant—a consultant, mind you—who came over to my house on Sunday morning, the morning after the Ethiopian New Year celebration, the morning that he, and everyone else but dumb ex-pats like me, had to visit every single family member’s residence and eat and talk and play with the kids and pretend not to be hungover, he came over and FIXED MY COMPUTER and will thereafter be referred to as He, because he is my Savior. He didn’t even try to mutter any compugeek to me, just said something about the operating system when I asked, in a false exhibition of trying to understand or care why my laptop had traumatized me so. A courtesy I greatly appreciated given my distraught and utterly ADD state, while I was trying to figure out how I could get a job at another organization here were I fired, and retrieve any of my music via my old CDs, which I believe are scattered throughout a certain sorority in Maryland at the moment. The relief at having it come back to life was far greater than that of using the clean bathroom at Ambo, which should say a lot.
Sunday afternoon Amel took pity on me and had me over to her house for New Year’s lunch, which is a bit like Thanksgiving where you eat until you start to consider your stomach an entirely separate entity from the rest of your body, forcing you to navigate turning corners and bending over very carefully. It was great. We had doro wat, which is a special chicken stew they serve on holidays, and the reason it’s special even though it’s just chicken is because it takes a ridiculously long time to prepare, due to the well-known fact that chickens are dirty creatures. Ethiopians buy their chickens live, wring their necks, pluck them, pull out the innards, and then scrub them for hours. First with hot water, then with lemon, then with hot water, then with salt, then with hot water, and so on. It takes a full day and two kilos of onions to make doro wat, which is why I will never learn to make it. That is something I am fully comfortable going to a restaurant for, like baclava and eggplant parmesan.
Monday was a holiday but I went into the office to work off our network and in the hope that I could e-mail people, try to re-establish human communications, and stop talking to my monitor, but of course, our internet was down all day and I had to actually be 100% productive. I hate that, don’t you? Whatever did people do to procrastinate/take a mental break before the days of e-mail? Is this why smoking is suddenly much less popular? We’ve traded burnt lungs, stained teeth, mouth, throat and lung cancer, and oxygen tanks for disgraceful posture, carpal tunnel, fat butts and bad eyesight (and probably cancer of another sort)? Hmmmm….not sure who came out of that comparison on top, to be honest.
posted by Margot @ 2:00 AM
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