Ranting and Raving

I took the train into Connecticut on Saturday to assist the parents with some projects and returned back on Sunday morning.

One of the projects I had to work on was the rebuild of the parents only computer due to a nasty virus infection. What a fiasco that turned into….

First off, they have close to 15 gigabytes of photos and documents and the machine is close to five years old. That being the case, the USB support is version 1.1 and not the faster 2.0. So it took me a total of four hours to copy all that data off the machine. This should have been a signal of what was to come.

Once that finished around 11pm, I begin the re-install of XP. The only part that actually WORKED in the entire fiasco. At that point it was 12:30am

Thankfully, this copy of XP included compatible network drivers, so I was back on the internet right away and I began doing updates. Unfortunately, the USB support went completely out the window. Nothing got it to recognize my thumb drive. Even going so far as updating the chipset drivers failed. As I had planned to transfer the files back via USB as well as use USB to transfer the Anti-virus and Office install files, this caused a serious crimp in the process. So I began the download process for at least the AV software…I could send them a DVD of Office at a later date. It is now 1:30am.

Download and install Service Pack 3 for XP, download and install Anti-virus, download and install several security updates, reboot and……..nothing. Nothing AT ALL. Not a thing. Monitor goes into power saver mode, even though the OS boots. It’s 3:30am at this point. I almost cried.

At this point, my parents woke up for some reason, and were shocked I was still awake working on this. They told me to quit it and go to bed. I did….extremely pissed off and disheartened. The only thing that allowed me to go to sleep was my exhaustion at 4am. I slept well until I had to wake up at 7:30am as I needed to head back to NYC early. So three hours of sleep is what I got. When I awoke the feelings of letting down the folks and not being able to finish came rushing back…I felt sick to my stomach and was mostly silent when I went out to breakfast with my family.

I’m not usually like this when something goes south like this whole rebuild did. I always let it go, and realize I did all I could. I am betting that it was the exhaustion and aggravation of it all that really got to me, but I seriously felt like an utter and complete failure. The funny thing is though, my parents weren’t even bummed about it….they were appreciative that I tried and are using it as a final excuse to upgrade to a new computer, so it did work out well. But it still bugged the shit out of me.

I no longer feel this way, so that’s why I’m thinking it was just the lack of sleep getting to me. And today has been a very busy and productive day. I know I am not a failure, and I did all I could in a limited amount of time for them. But still, it was a horrible feeling, and it worries me how close to the surface these feelings are.