Black Monday
Every so often one has a day that can best be described as one perpetual disaster. Today was such a day.
I got up this morning feeling tired but decently rested. I went to bed late last night because I wasn't tired. So I stayed up working on the site and half heartedly watching Purple Rain on Bravo. I had never seen it before and was quite disappointed by what I saw. It did not live up to its hype as a great movie of the 80's. Ah, well, so few movies from that era hold up over time anyway. But I digress.
So I get up this morning and head to work. Staying at Cathy's is great because I am 15 minutes from the office as opposed to my usual 45 minute distant. When I get to my desk I see that my computer monitors are displaying the generic blue Mac background but no login screen and there is are high-pitched beeps coming from the tower. Correction, perpetual high-pitched rhythmic beeps identical to that of a heart monitor in an intensive care unit room at a hospital. I knew this wasn't good.
I attempted to restart and upon doing so the beeping continued and one of my dual monitors went out completely while the other just displaced a white screen of total oblivion. I knew then that this was beyond bad. I was fucked.
Our new IT guy confirmed this. As soon as he walked into my office he said, "Oh, no, I HATE that sound!" To which I said, "What does it mean?" His reply was, "It means your hard drive is fried." At that moment I waited for the rhythmic beeps to suddenly make a flatlining noise. They didn't though...
And so, the IT guy set to work pulling out my hard drive and attempting to rescue any data from it. He wasn't able to. That sucker was deader than a Carrot Top routine at a Florida retirement home. My hard drive would have to be replaced. And I was going to be displaced until the work was finished.
Luckily I was able to use my coworkers nice private office. The bad news is that because of the way the network is configured I wasn't able to use the HTML editing program and uploading software essential to our jobs. Apparently because the programs were installed locally on her machine, the network would allow me to log in on her unit as myself and work with all of my files, but I couldn't access certain programs because they were configured to be usable only by her. I was pissed. In the end I ended up have to use a USB memory stick and my laptop in order to get any work done. I couldn't upload anything from my laptop but at least I could edit files.
I was very fortunate in that I didn't lose any work files because they are all saved under my user name on the network. So losing the hard drive was not really bad at all, aside from the inconvenience factor. What was a tragedy though is that I lost all 2070 MP3's that I had stored on my old hard drive!!! The list of all the songs plus my playlists remained intact but the files themselves were gone. I spent hours and MONTHS ripping those files to my work machine and now they are all gone and I have to reload them all again! 
I am so pissed off about this. I would have stored them on the server with the other files but our Nazi of an IT director (not the nice IT guy who has been working on my machine) doesn't want us to "clutter the server" with non-essential files. It's not like I lost anything that isn't replaceable, but the fact I have to take the time to compile and reload everything is very annoying and a waste of my time. I need music to function in my environment. It helps me stay focused and create. This new situation is a major kink in my work flow.
*Sigh* I am seriously glad that this day is almost over. I intend to walk Lila, and then crawl under the covers and just sleep. I'm tired, bitchy, and irritable and in need of some seriously good chocolate ice cream right now.
On a more positive note my new laptop seems to be already living up to its cost. Not only have I been able to work on the site while in transit but it is proving to be very useful at the office. So not everything is totally bleak, at least I hope not anyway.
