Can you believe it?

I shut myself and the dogs in my bedroom with my computer yesterday while the painters got to work.

The plan was to catch up on stuff after being snowed by a freelance job – mainly filling out paperwork to bolster my ailing bank account and applying for jobs.

The universe hates it when I make plans and so, when I tried to boot up my 11-month-old computer, it wouldn’t start.

I got a “bad system config” message and couldn’t for the life of me work out how to fix it. I panicked and booked a technician to come out and take a look. Like I needed another bill – they charged my credit card $170 in advance.

It was a bit of a bummer being without a computer all day because there wasn’t much to do in my bedroom without it. I scrolled through social media, finally finished reading Girt, then realised I’d just wasted a perfectly good opportunity to tidy up my pig pen.

My friend Fee texted with a podcast suggestion around 11am and asked how I was going. When I told her my sorry news, she kindly offered me her laptop. I raced over to collect it, had a quick chinwag, then headed home to pick the eldest up for his birthday lunch. The eldest turned 17 yesterday and requested Ribs n Burgers to celebrate (dinner was literally just a sponge cake, with a single candle and a quick”Happy Birthday” solo from me).

As I motored around the neighbourhood, I left the dogs luxuriating on my bed, where they are not normally allowed to sleep. They were totes stoked.

I was not happy about all those wasted hours waiting for a geek to come to me at 5pm. But that seems to be the way of my world at the moment. Lots of hiccups.

When Niaz finally walked through the door, he sat down for literally five seconds, announced my hard drive was screwed and said I needed a new computer.

I considered weeping, but I’m all out of tears this week.

He told me to call HP and tell them to replace my computer. I called HP and a nice bloke called Ben – who was working from home somewhere that a rooster was merrily crowing in the background – talked me through a system check that confirmed my hard drive WAS NOT screwed. It was a software problem, which was both good and bad news.

The bad news was that I’d paid Niaz $170 to bullshit me, had not been backing up my computer due to it being moved to a temporary location during the unexpectedly loooooooong renovation and would need to track down a technician (not effing Niaz) to try and transfer my data off the computer and then return the computer to its original factory setting.

The good news was that a factory reset might fix it. And so, that is my undoubtedly expensive task for today. I may also have an argument with Niaz about his appalling lack of IT skills. I do not recommend using ‘Geeks in Sydney’ if you are unlucky enough to have computer issues.

Upon reflection, it would have been smarter and cheaper to just call HP in the first place. I have no idea why I didn’t – I make very poor decisions sometimes.

Eff you 2020. You suck.

Song of the day: Kylie Minogue “I should be so lucky”