Creating a Path for Learning in the 21st Century

Last Sunday, service pack 1 for Microsoft Office suited was downloaded and automatically installed on my home computer. For the next 24 hours I experienced small glitches with Office freezing and certain web pages on showing (eBay and Gmail), and hours later USB ports stopped working. My iPod was not recognized by the computer and that was the big sign, but the printer continued to work. By Monday I was getting to know the Tech from Dell really well and we had an hour or more of great conversations about Internet Explorer, hardware, software, and much more until he decided he needed to run this scan on my hard drive that would last thirty minutes. He even took control of my desktop remotely to do all the techie things he could think of or all the techie things on his little check list.

While running the scan, I told him I needed to run off to a meeting and my wife would take the controls. He graciously gave us both good directions since he would loose desktop access during the scan and at some point the brain of the computer would ask me to insert the operating system disk. He decided he would give us time to wait it out (my wife to wait it out) and he would call back around eight.

At eight PM I waited patiently and read blogs and more blogs and wrote in my journal and read and wrote more and by ten the phone never rang. I called it a night, but I was not very happy. My bed time reading from a real books starts shortly after nine. My wife took charge of my normal duty of putting Anna to bed, against Anna’s wishes (she is a daddy’s girl and she is eight. She may not want me to do this forever.).

I slept on the thoughts of Dell, and Tuesday after my six o’clock meeting I called Dell Tech . I gave them my case number and share my disappointment and they were so kind and apologetic. I really felt good about the situation and ended up feeling better about Dell. It took about an hour and finally this wonderful Dell Tech decided I needed to back up all my important data so I can restart the computer as if it came out of the box.

It took me almost Wednesday and a little more time early Thursday morning to back things up to my external hard drive. By seven PM, I called the Dell Tech, presented my case number, and told the fine young man from the Philippines to “Let’s get it done.” (Before I made that call, I poured my first glass of Chardonnay. I had had day from the Hades and needed something special to help me relax). Ten minutes later the computer was doing a complete restore. I was impressed that a factory image was stored away on my hard drive. That was a handy tip.

I had a great chat with the Techie guy from the Philippines. We became instant friends. We talked about our families, our dreams, the economy, computer stuff, and the weather. We really did have a lot in common. As time wore on, my computer accepted the image well and we said our goodbyes. (I was now on my second glass of wine) The next hour and half was the process of restoring everything from my external hard drive, setting up email, virus protection updates, (third glass of wine and skipping supper with the family), windows updates, and more.

Then suddenly as I loaded iTunes I realized my huge collection of music was gone. I was in a panic mode and realized that all my music was still on my iPod. Great!!!! How do you move music from the iPod to iTunes? Great (another glass of wine) and now I turned to Google to find an answer. It was a $33 dollar answer.

I stopped for my cold dinner and it was great!!!! It was a no brainer about spending the $33 buck. I spent the money and got everything completed and back to normal.

Then I was off to bad and fasten my CPAP mask to my face and slept like a baby.