It’s amazing how great you can feel after ten hours of sleep, Monkey Keys. Sure my PC was in pieces all over the drawing room floor, but I was sleep privileged. Better yet, soon I’d be at work where my colleagues could undoubtedly find me a disk.
January 25, 2010: Hour 21
I was able to procure several floppies, and I announced I would be leaving at lunch to further troubleshoot. The clock was ticking. That very night I had a scheduled Team Fortress Two event with many of these same co-workers. My very reputation as a techie was at stake. I felt confident though. After all, I had brought an ancient Fintstone era PC back from the brink of death the night before. Surely the destruction of this stupid little house in the middle of the highway would be child’s play in comparison.
“You should be careful, Dylan. Arrogance breads bad karma.” Your FACE breads bad karma, Mystic Key.
January 25, 2010: Hour 25
Ancient tech in hand, I approached Fred. Surgical equipment lay strewn about the operation site from the night before. He still booted fine, and I was even able to install HUGEPOS on him with no incident.
See, I told you this would be easy.
“Karma…”
I popped disk one into the drive and went to format it. For the non techs, this is a way of writing an instruction manual on a new disk for the computer to read. Computers are like trained monkeys sans the fez. As such, they have no clue what to do when given something fresh out of a store wrapper. They generally try to eat it. So I was explaining to Fred the disk would need to hold a wrecking ball capable of destroying a little house in the middle of the highway between me and my stuff.
I very gently tapped Fred on his shoulder twice and tried to tell this to him. He blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the majority share holder at Norton.
“Oooooo, sounds kinda like…” You shut your font, Taunt Key!
January 25, 2010: Hour 26
I’m sure I was audible by aliens thus far unreached by the SETI project when I screamed in Fred’s face. I set about the usual vein troubleshooting. Maybe a different disk would work? Do I just need to reseat the drive? Are my BIOS settings correct? Is there something wrong with the floppy drivers?
Fred laughed at each of my ideas to find any rational explanation behind his sudden inability to do the one basic function I needed. Out of desperation, I tried running HUGEPOS to put the wrecking ball on an unformatted disk. HUGEPOS joined in Fred’s laughter. Then Fred asked HUGEPOS on a date, and HUGEPOS agreed.
The two decided the movies were rather cliché for their first time out, so instead they went to the park. It was cold, of course. The deep freeze didn’t matter though. Whenever HUGEPOS gazed longingly into Fred’s eyes, there was magic.
The two had a lovely dinner at a small, family owned Italian place. Fred had the lasagna since it was the only thing on the menu he could actually pronounce. HUGEPOS called him out on this, and the two started laughing. It was at that moment that Fred wondered if he was in love.
It was only the first date, but they had so much in common. They were nearly the same age. They both hated doing their job. They both loved blinking repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of any woman who would willingly marry anyone on the HUGEPOS staff.
Fred was taking a huge risk here, but he had to say something. He swallowed a bit of sourdough bread, and boldly cleared his throat. HUGEPOS looked up in anticipation.
“Windows was unable to complete the format.”
I took out my José Canseco bat and swung with the force of a thousand suns into the side of Fred. Bits of motherboard and case showered the room in a techno glitter. He coughed out a blue screen once, and then there was silence.
January 25, 2010: Hour 28
“You KILLED Fred!?” Alright, relax, Humanitarian Key. I was only imagining. In reality I gave up and wrote part one of this story. The only thing I hadn’t tried was using an entirely different floppy drive, and there was no way I’d find anyone with that. I was doomed.
Or was I?
In the midst of writing part one, I received a text from one of the Team Fortress Keys. He had a USB floppy drive I could try! I was running out of time, but told him I would stop by his house when he got home to pick it up. If this didn’t work, I would be forced to play on his old PC and suffer the humiliation.
January 25, 2010: Hour 30
With an hour to go, and a new floppy drive in my hands, I powered up my laptop. This was going to work. A few clicks later, and my laptop was formatting a floppy disk. I gave Fred a quick kick for good measure. He had it coming… karma.
HUGEPOS even cooperated by properly making its wrecking ball. I was elated. All I needed to do was plug the USB floppy drive into my new PC and run the boot disk. I’d make Team Fortress 2. I’d be a hero!
I raced to my PC and virtually slammed the drive in the back. That little house was going to get it now. I was going to atom smash it into oblivion forever. The machine booted into the disk. I selected the wrecking ball. Adios house! I hit enter.
It blinked repeatedly at me with the brain damaged look of the tattered remnants of my sanity. The house remained, and I’m fairly confident HUGEPOS and Fred were celebrating their honeymoon inside.
I could have dropkicked the monitor I suppose. I did the next best thing. I went to my friend’s house to play on his old PC. Mine remained dead, and I had failed.
I think I'm most disturbed not by your humiliation or your wasted 30 hours but by that drawing…yaaaa.