Trials & Tribulations

Yesterday was a good day. My deck was finally finished on my condominium. It got painted, closing a 57 day process that left me without a deck for some of the best weather of the summer. Still, when the maintenance guy who was painting told me that other decks in my vicinity are now going to be condemned for structural reasons, I knew that I was lucky and once again, “someone” is looking out for me.

It all started when my patio door was getting stuck, and I produced the letter that I received when I moved in, saying that my deck would be replaced last year and my patio door this summer. My jammed door was replaced and then the maintenance guys said they would do my deck the next day. Due to rotting support beams, it got kind of out-of-hand and became a really big project that a contractor had to be hired to fix.

I’m going to need to sell one of these days, and it would be hard to sell a condo with a condemned deck. Now I have the finest deck in the kingdom!

At my new tech job, I have been trying to re-image a bunch of laptops that need some serious updating. Each one has its own unique problems, and most share a problem of not booting up with the flash drive that initiates the process. I have also had network problems, software glitches and long talks to the HP call center in India. Finally, with some help from some amazing computer “wranglers” at the district office, things are generally going well (though not everything is fixed yet), and I am now handling the laptops that were previously handling me.

I was elated! I began taunting the laptops, as they were forced to connect to my ghost server. “Victory is mine!” I said. “You cannot defeat me! You are nothing but circuits!” I boasted to the stupid laptops! Yes, what a fine time I had!