Crashed & burned

It’s not that I didn’t want to blog yesterday.  I did.

I was sitting with laptop firmly in lap yesterday morning, figuring and inputting more of our tax return online, when all of a sudden, my computer froze.  The kind of freeze that not even Ctrl+Alt+Delete doesn’t help.  So I forced ‘er down and tried to begin again.

I think my first concern was when a startup screen said something about not being able to access my hard drive.  Yikes.

I called Dell support and talked with a helpful woman who – after 1 hour and 20 minutes – determined my hard drive had indeed gone bad and she’d send me a new one.  Luckily, our warranty had just under one month remaining, so it won’t cost us anything.  That was a blessing.

The new hard drive could come tomorrow, but it also could be Monday.

In the meanwhile, I resurrected our old desk top computer which hasn’t seen action in at least 6 months, maybe closer to a year.  I reconnected it to our modem and now it’s making do until the laptop is back. 

In total, I spent over 2 hours yesterday on the phone with call centers, the other one being DirecTV.  Last weekend I got pretty hot under the collar when dealing with those people. 

The receiver in our bedroom began (some months ago) only picking up select channels.  When Josh was home last Saturday, we finally decided to call about it.  They usually ask you to do a bunch of diagnostic stuff, unplugging wires, resetting buttons, etc., and it’s not the easiest for me to reach – especially if the kids are around.  I needed a hero – and Josh came to the call.

After I don’t know how long – they determined our receiver had gone bad.  No problem, we thought – since we upgraded to a DVR receiver in the living room, we had our old functioning receiver packed away.  We connected that to the bedroom tv, but it wouldn’t work because its access card was expired, which must have happened with the upgrade.  So we just popped in our active access card from the receiver that had just broken into the old, but functioning receiver.  No go. 

They explained to us that each access card is tied to a specific receiver and to replace an access card (looks like a credit card) is $20.  Oh, no.  That wouldn’t do!  I couldn’t believe they couldn’t just activate one of the access cards we already had to the receiver!  Or I didn’t understand why they couldn’t just mail us a new one, free of charge.  After all, we need it to get their service and there wasn’t anything wrong with our other access cards.  So after a lot of haggling, we got them to credit the cost of a new access card and send us a replacement.

A small victory – or so we thought.

The new access card came yesterday and I called to activate it.  I was transferred from an automated line to a live representative to activate.  She promptly activated the new card, so that it would work in our… wait for it… living room DVR receiver.  URGH!  These cards cannot evidently be reprogrammed, so now the new card could never be used in our bedroom and we’d have to wait for them to send yet another card.  Sigh.

If only everything would work the way it’s supposed to, all the time.  If only.

So now I’m without a debit card, without a laptop and without TV in the bedroom, what will I do?

*sniffles*

:)

Trust me, I’ll be ok!  I’m really excited – this morning my friend Nichole and I are going MALLWALKING!  She’s also pregnant so we’ll waddle our way up and down and all around that mall.  I desperately need the exercise – so I can’t wait!

And then later this afternoon our AEA meeting for Jude is finally going to be held.  We had to postpone the meeting that was supposed to take place earlier this month because of weather.  Hopefully, I’ll have a good report for tomorrow.