She Lives!

<-- Feel the life-breath coming from my newly resuscitated computer!

At 4 p.m., Chris finally finished putting Tab A into Slot B, expectantly pushed the power button ... AND ... nothing happened. Then he crawled back under my desk, plugged the power cord in and we were off to the races.

My first order of business was to install FireFox and delete all the IE shortcuts. Then, I imported my bookmarks (which are saved online for just such an occasion), set up a half-dozen shortcuts to various network folders, downloaded all my local files from the server, set up MS-SQL and put up that nifty ArsTechnica wallpaper.

Then I went about reinstalling a few programs -- that's what's on the big yellow Post-It stuck to the monitor. Among the lucky winners (in order): SpybotS&D, AdAware, SmartFTP, AlternaTIFF, StumbleUpon, AIM, Winamp and iTunes.

And then I beheld my desktop and saw that it was good. And on the seventh day I rested.

You know, when all is said and done, I appreciate that I don't need to call the tech guys every time something goes wrong. Yes, I let Chris do the OS reinstall, but only because I know my boss would probably frown on me doing it myself. ::grins::

I'm very proud -- and very defensive -- of my capabilities. I'll gladly lend a hand with software problems, and I love it when others ask me to find something obscure on the Internet. (Hey, I am mistress of the Invisible Web.) Likewise, I get defensive when I'm treated as if I'm ignorant. Not that I can blame IT people -- they put up with a lot of crap. In fact, most are incredibly patient when fielding questions about why a computer isn't working during a power outage. (Incidentally, I've discovered that most users are very intelligent but underconfident. Paul's taught me you should be ballsy enough to get yourself into trouble and ballsy enough to bail yourself out.)

It all boils down to this: Don't assume all users are nub before they open their mouths. I know that servers don't work in restaurants and firewalls aren't flame-retardant. Treat me like I'm an idiot, and the only one who'll need the flame-retardant is you.