Dear Diary.... today was a bad day

"Dear Diary, today was a bad day..........."

It doesn't happen often, but today I had one of those days - you know the ones - where everything seems to conspire against you.

You always know when it is going to be one of those days, because things go wrong right from the very beginning. In my case, I got out of bed at 7.15am after not sleeping very well, went downstairs and promptly stood in a pile of dog crap that Naughty George had deposited on the living room floor. At first I didn't know it was dog crap because the lights were off, but even through the haze of sleepiness, it slowly dawned on me that floorboards don't have that amount of 'give' or 'squelch'.

I turned on the lamp and surveyed the damage. The widespread configuration of the dog sausages seemed to suggest that Naughty George had not only gone for a crap, but that he had revelled in it. What. a. git.

So, not only did I have to suffer the humiliation of hopping my way to the garden to wipe my slipper on the grass, but it took me fifteen gag-tastic minutes to clean up the mess, which in turn made me late taking Izzy to school. Grrrrrrr!

Once Izzy was dropped off, I decided to go back home and work there for the day (I had lots of admin to do), rather than go into the office. I put the kettle on and fired up my trusty new super-gadget; my Sony Vaio VPCF11Z1E laptop; scrumptious thing that it is - £1400's worth of gizmos and widgets crammed into a lovely, shiney black case.

I sat down to work, flexed my fingers, and then moved the mouse, only to find the pointer remained static in the centre of the screen. I checked that the mouse was plugged in and tried again. But that evil little pointer remained steadfastly in place. I pressed alt + ctrl + del in an attempt to bring up Task Manager..... but nothing.

Oh yeh, my laptop had locked-up solidly. I pressed the off-switch and did a hard reboot. First, the welcome screen appeared and then my desktop, and then..... it locked up again. Sacre-bloody-bleu! I repeated the process a few times, just to confirm that the bloody thing was indeed knackered (technical term), and indeed it was.

Pic.No.1. My dead Sony Vaio VPCF11Z1E (well maybe 'dead' is too strong a word - it is on life support machine called 'safe mode')

Computers are funny things. One minute they are all sunshiney and let you do fun things like setting up cool screen-savers, play games and watch TV on demand, and then, without warning, they plunge you into the abyss. The abyss consists of msconfigs, hardware diagnostics, system restores, partioning and other such vagaries that you really know nothing about....... and so you become an outcast, randomly poking your finger into a big, huge ball of technological, acronym-babble. Yep, my once trusty Vaio had morphed itself into a binary pirahna pool.

I won't go into much detail, but suffice to say, I spent six hours today flailing around in various Sony Vaio help forums........ and was the problem fixed? Nope. Nowhere near. So, tomorrow I face the prospect of spending all day on the phone to Vaio Support Technicians asking me questions which I don't understand, and then (resulting from exasperation on both sides), my laptop will probably be recalled under warranty and I won't see it for two months.

So all in all, a pretty crappy day, and that's without even touching upon the 'Izzy tantrum' or the 'Naughty George fighting two Rottweilers on his walk' episodes.

Despite all my whining above, I'm not normally a miserable git, so this evening I made a protracted effort to find something cheery..... and after visiting a blog called 'injaynesworld' I found just the tonic. This video is absolutely brilliant, and I defy you not to feel cheered-up, even if you have had a bad day......... Enjoy.

 

Vid.No.1. Doggy day out at the beach

P.S. Sorry to sneak back, but I couldn't resist finding out if you like the video as much as me!