Dear Diary:
Get car!
In retrospect, it was a fine day, but only in retrospect do we get to see the bottom line. For most of the afternoon, I fretted about having to go out this evening. I behaved as though seeing Lynn Redgrave’s Nightingale were a chore, which of course it was not. But I wanted to stay home and work on things. I suppose I was no better when I was nine, and thought only of my train set in the basement.
Then, at about 5:30, the bottom dropped out: the file transfer protocol program declined to function. The FTP program is the utility that transmits pages from my computer to Portico’s Web server. Even after rebooting, it declined to function. Rebooting was the problem, actually; I had rebooted the machine just before lunch. I’d promised Quatorze a copy of Barry Lyndon, and Jason (God of Tech) had cautioned me that DVDs were best copied on empty buffers. It had been over a week since the last reboot, so….
The next thing you know, checkdisk. I do hate the sight of DOS screens. And then a few of apps didn’t work quite as usual once the machine was up and running. PhotoShop, for example. I had to deselect an option that’s never checked in order to resize an image in pixels rather than inches. That was weird. When Cute FTP melted down, I wasn’t entirely surprised. But I was completely flustered anyway. The proverbial headless chicken — that was me. Jason would never give me up (I don’t think), but there are TeamViewer chat transcripts to prove it. Ned Beatty could have played the part of me.
I couldn’t be having this problem at 5:30! I had to get dressed for the theatre soon! I had to go out, and leave my wounded computer untended. Jason appeared as faithfully as the genie in Aladdin’s lamp (remotely — a bit of magic that couldn’t be managed in Sheherazade’s day), but even before he suggested that reloading the application was probably the best idea, I was wondering where, just the other day, I had put all the computer-related CDs. I had moved them for a reason — there were too many discs for the box that I’d been using — but where had I put them? Cluck, cluck!
After I got dressed, I found discs; sometimes, you have to solve a bother before you can solve the problem that it was bothering you from. By 6:45, the domestic security status was “copacetic.” My brain was recovering some of its wattage.
There had certainly been a brownout. Before making contact with Jason, I had madly attached the two pages that I’d planned to upload to Portico to emails sent from my mindspring account to my gmail account. On the laptop in the living room (where I “create”), I enjoyed a mad runaround trying to figure out whither, exactly, Firefox places downloaded attachments. Cute FTP was working fine on the laptop, so I was able to upload the pages — phew!
But here’s how crazed I was. In order to make sure that the pages looked just right, I had to go back into the blue room and interrupt Jason so that I could open Portico and see if all was well. It never ever crossed my mind that I could have conducted this examination from the laptop. My brain had self-stupiditized.
When I told Jason that, if I were rich, I’d plaster the town will billboards advertizing his services, he demurred: the phone calls would drive him crazy. But of course if I were rich, I could stake him to a receptionist. Get car! And you would, too. I’m talking about the thanks of a very grateful clientele.