Bad Computer!

My advice to my computer is to be on its very best behavior because it's a looooong two-story drop to the ground.

Blair and I were up past 11 last night, alternating between cussing and flipping off the computer and each other. (We don't do well late at night.)  I've got an important e-mail to send with 4 attachments. All together, it's just under 3 MB of information. A large amount, yes, but people send larger files every day with no problem.

At first we thought the files themselves were the problem, specifically one very large pdf. So we zipped the file individually and with the other files. Only when we went to send it, it was as if the file had unzipped itself as the full MB was still showing as properties. So we tried saving the PDF as a word document. Fine, except when we opened the document, although the file was there if you clicked around the page, it initially showed up blank. Grrrr....

I can't even convey the amount of Adobe, jpg, Word, pdf aerobics we went through. Finally, Blair was on the phone at 11 PM with Road Runner, and after 20 minutes they determined it was an Outlook problem and we needed to contact Microsoft. Words to strike fear into the heart of even the bravest computer user.

I think our system is set to crash. Here's just a partial list of poltergeist hijinks we've been dealing with:

• If someone sends me a jpg, I can see it in the e-mail and I can save it to a file and open it. But I get an error message if I just click on the attachment to open it.
• About every 15-20 minutes the computer "freezes." I have to walk away for about 1 minute and then it's fine. Only sometimes I have to close every program that's open, frequently losing online work I've been doing. These are the days I wander to the wine cabinet about noon and think, "Maybe..."
• I can't send any large files via e-mail and it takes 5 minutes to download one someone sends me
• I frequently get messages that my e-mail is at capacity, even though I'm more religious than anyone I know about deleting old messages and I CANNOT believe I have more on my e-mail then the average worker bee.
• Updating to this blog is troublesome. Pictures take forever to upload. I have several friends who use Squarespace and they don't have this issue, leaving me to point blame at our computer.

And that's just what tops the list. I have to admit, as much as I felt bad for Blair last night that he was so frustrated at the expense of trying to help me, I was secretly glad he got a taste of what I feel like I deal with daily with the computer from hell.

I don't mind figuring out something new. There are always rules to be learned. But what drives me absolutely batty is when a tool or program that has always worked suddenly doesn't. For no reason. You haven't changed anything, no updates have been made. Everything is exactly the same except it no longer works. Makes me mental.

Bad computer! Bad, bad, bad computer!