A Stick Got Stuck

I must have run over a Mormon’s dog. Or, if not a Mormon, then one of that lot that believe in predestination and bad things happening to good people. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such a terrible run of bad luck. I do know that it’s been a hellish 48 hours.

The rain hasn’t stopped since Sunday afternoon and today the thunder has been rumbling since dawn. Not that I’ve had much chance to notice either. I slept surrounded by a dismantled computer with the Windows boot screen filling dreams that refused to fully load.

After Gabby kicked me out of the flat on Sunday, I spent a miserable night in a local hotel run by Mrs. Norris, a fifty two year old landlady with a taste for margaritas and lonely lodgers. My exile lasted until early Monday morning, when Gabby rang my mobile at nine thirty.

‘Chip, I forgive you,’ she said, as simply as that and without a degree of sympathy for the innocent man forced to spend an evening faking an asthma attack before barricading the door to his hotel room.

‘What do you mean, you forgive me?’ I asked, determined that my wrongful punishment should not pass without comment. ‘You threw me out of my own flat for no reason except an old friend decided to kiss me on the cheek!’

‘I know, I sorry,’ said she of the knee jerk reactions. ‘But I want you to come back. I miss you, Chippy.’

Half an hour later, leaving a tearful Mrs. Norris behind me, I dropped my bag in the hallway of the flat. Gabby hugged me in welcome but before I could say I was happy to be home, she was leading me into the office.

‘It stopped working when I turn it on this morning,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Computer. The computer not work.’

I began to see why she had forgiven me so quickly.

‘Computer turn off and I can’t get it back on again. I know you can fix.’

And with that, she shut and locked the door to the office and left me to work my magic. It took me fifteen hours to get it to load but by then I’d ripped out the sound card, two graphic cards, three hard drives, a floppy drive, a DVD burner. Then I’d got down to the gut of the machine. I cleaned out the fans, tested all the power connections, tightened screws. Only at one o’clock this morning did I think of pulling out one of the memory modules.

And the machine finally came alive.

After a day searching, I discovered that one stick of memory had failed. Small blessing really. Eighty pounds might not seem much but it’s eighty pounds I don’t have. Only Gabby was neither impressed nor forgiving.

‘You want to go back to hotel?’ she screamed when I told her the bad news. ‘You get computer working and I forgive you. But, Chippy, if I see one blue screen. I kick you out again.’

So now I’m living by the moment. I have to find the money for the new memory and then I’ll be trusting that the engineers at Microsoft have written an operating system stable enough to protect me from a prolonged stay with Mrs. Norris.

Like I said: it’s been a hellish 48 hours. I now worry that the next 48 are going to be much much worse.