A computer’s ghost is haunting the technology in my new home office. I’m convinced that a long time ago, probably on a dark and stormy night, a computer was killed in that room, and now it seeks revenge on every piece of technology that dares enter.
It’s tragic, really.
I moved into my new house at the beginning of the summer. Originally I’d planned to make the living room my home office. That may seem unusual, but I thought it would work well. That room is bright and open, with big windows. There’s a corner I could tuck my desk into so that it wasn’t in the way. Then the downstairs could be entirely kid space: a family room with the TV and xBox, and the spare bedroom as a craft/project room. Space where they could be messy and create and paint and draw and be loud.
After a few weeks, however, moving my office downstairs was starting to sound like a better idea: having a door that closed, having a closet. Places to lock up things that need to be locked up. So I decided to move my office to the spare bedroom, to see if that might be better.
It took several days to get the furniture moved and everything set up: taking apart my newly assembled desk, moving it piece by piece and then assembling it again, setting up – and then filling – three new bookshelves.
Then the problems began.
During a work meeting, my cell phone dropped the call twice. Text messages started randomly failing to send. I started hearing from people that I was missing calls and messages.
My work laptop, typically my faster computer, slowed to a crawl. Click. Wait…. Click. Wait…. Work wouldn’t save and was having to be redone, sometimes multiple times. Software wouldn’t open. Anything on the internet became almost impossible.
I tested the internet speed, called the cable company and finally decided it must be the laptop itself and requested a replacement. In the mean time I switched to working on my personal laptop.
Which worked just fine for a few days.
Then, suddenly, I turned it on one morning and saw nothing but a black screen and a blinking white light. A Google search brought me the devastating news: that particular blinking light meant that my CPU had gone to that big circuit graveyard in the sky.
I had no time to mourn. I had a meeting in an hour that I was supposed to be running. There must be a way!
My tablet wouldn’t let me get on any secure website, saying there’d been a breech of security. My son’s laptop wouldn’t let me access the meeting website because of parental controls I have set, but also wouldn’t allow me to disable the parental controls.
Finally, my daughter’s laptop, typically the least reliable in the house, let me on the website I needed, despite having the EXACT SAME parental controls set as my son’s.
Something was definitely not normal.
So I gave up. I waved the white flag and brought my work laptop back up to the living room, where I am currently working on a folding table in a corner. The laptop is working much better here. So is my tablet. My multiple monitors, new desk, and comfy chair sit empty and abandoned in the now darkened room downstairs.
I called a tech guy, who’s coming out later this week and try and fix things.
I told him to bring his proton pack, just in case.
