I got to work early this morning. Everything was fine. I put my empty egg carton in the the chicken lady’s collection box. I faarrred up my work laptop. Everything was fine. I faarrrred up my email application. Still okay. Then I tried my I/M application. 3ljdsoifjlk3kldlk##$$dd. It was worse than the notorious old “You have performed an illegal operation” message. Total gobblety-gook. Tried it again. 3liij2l383k##4h2@. Shut down computer. Faaarrrred up again. And had to change my password. Okay. Haaaannnnnnng there for a while and then The Blue Screen Of Death. I held my breath for the longest time. Just as I was about to hit the panic button, the old blue screen morphed into my loverly cluttered desktop. And my I/M app started up without a hitch. Sigh of relief.

Once, back in the day, I was trying to faarrrrr up our old Macintosh Plus. We were just barely past the days when you had to boot up by inserting a floppy disk into the disk drive. I can’t remember whether our hard drive was internal or external but all we had to do was turn on the computer and it would boot up. That was a luxury! Except for this one day. I turned on the computer. It started up with a smiley face. It gave me all the nice, happy messages I was expecting. We got almost all the way to the loverly cluttered desktop and… KABOOOM!!! I tried again. And again. And over and over again. KABOOM KABOOM KABOOMITY BOOMITY BOOM BOOM! #%@&! What is going on? Finally, in exasperation and some trepidation, I called the GG at work. I was expecting a long drawn-out diagnostic process to ensue, with calls to various Apple support folks. But no. He immediately replied, “Oh, the talking moose must be in the system folder again.” SAY WHAT??? Er, whaddya mean, again? The remedy for that? Dredge around for an old floppy boot disk, put that in the floppy drive, boot up the computer, and REMOVE THE TALKING MOOSE FROM THE SYSTEM FOLDER!! Worked like a charm.

And guess what? Apparently, the Talking Moose is still around after all these years. Think I should download him?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 5:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.