Pink

I was typing along and then – WHAM – the computer screen turned pink. I guess it was pink. It’s hard for me to label colors, now that I’m a computer geek. I’m pretty sure this particular color was 0XFF00FF, which is quite a bit darker than what I would classify as “pink”. But if you sat 10 people in my office, probably 7 of them would have called it a “pink screen”.

The keyboard was locked up. It couldn’t reset the system with CTRL-ALT-DEL, although the harddrive light blinked on, suggesting the computer was busy doing something when I tried (swapping out virtual memory?). I slammed my fists on either side of the keyboard, because I’d been working for the last several hours on an project. Most of it would probably be saved from the Auto-Save feature, but I probably lost the last 10 minutes of work (I still haven’t looked yet). The slamming fists, or the spew of obscenities from my mouth, startled the two colleagues in my office, but they politely ignored my rampage.

This was the third time my computer has locked up in the past few weeks – each time the same way, although the color changes. Last week, I got a white screen (or 0xFFFFFF). One or two weeks before, I got a blackish-grey screen (0x000033, probably). Both times, I’d lost a sizeable amount of work.

So I sent a note to our crack IT squad, telling them they’d given me another Lemon Laptop. The IT engineer responded back,

“JP, this is the third Laptop I have rebuilt for you in the past four months, this is as frustrating for me as it is for you. Unfortunately I don't have any D620's which is our newest models, not sure if where to go from here?

Bob, any ideas?”

He CC’d his boss (Bob), and my boss (nice). The clear implication here is that, “JP keeps breaking laptops, and management needs to intervene!”.

It’s true, this is the third laptop I’ve had hear in my 4 years at the company. My first three years were trouble-free and bliss, but a few months ago, I started having problems with the computer. The computer would lock-up for a fraction of a second. I type rather fast, and the effect of this lock-up would be that the computer skipped letters during my typing. So a single sentence might look something like this: “Nowis te time for allgood men to com to the aid of their ountry.”

It wasn’t a sticky keyboard (no comments, please, Angie) – because it was a different character every time. And in the above text, I exaggerated the frequency of the lockup – it probably occurred 4-6 times in a page, not 4-6 times in a sentence. But the effect was equally frustrating. I had to type slower, and spend more time correcting every report, email or document that I wrote.

IT couldn’t figure out why the computer was behaving this way, so they replaced the computer. Not with a new computer, mind you, but with a used piece of junk that some other employee had turned in. And I soon found out why.

The “new” (refurbished) Dell600 laptop – same model I owned previously -- was PAINFULLY slow. It took 6 minutes and 23 seconds for the computer to load a simple PowerPoint presentation. When I tried to ALT-TAB from one application to another, I could literally get up from my desk, go down the hall, get a cup of coffee, and come back before the computer had transitioned to the new application. I would start an application like Excel or Word, and then sit in front of my workstation, shooting rubber bands at the screen waiting for the application to load.

So I complained to IT. They got me another computer – this one an upgraded D610 model, with twice the RAM (1GB) than my old laptop. It’s been working beautifully, aside from these occasional lockups.

So here’s the memo to IT: Fix my computer. That’s all I want. I just want a computer that works … flawlessly. I don’t care if it weighs 20 pounds, or has 0xFFCCFF polka-dots on it. I just want a computer that allows me to perform my job.