… was a complete washout. I spent the entire day struggling with technology in some form or another. A USB port that had been working perfectly well up till yesterday around noon, and into which was plugged my external hard drive, decided to malfunction (yes! I show as a drive! no! there is nothing on me!). At first I thought my external hard drive (you know, the one that holds everything as a backup, plus all my music?) had given up the ghost, so that’s where I focused my attention once I recovered from the heart attack. After a couple of hours I discovered that it was the USB port creating an I/O problem. The tower won’t recognise the USB hub I own, so I had to juggle my peripherals. (Six. I have six things that require a USB port. There are only three ports that function now. Oy.) Then I tried to get the printer my dad had sent home with me to work, with zero luck. There were power issues (no matter where I plugged the damn thing in it wouldn’t turn on) and when I finally resolved that (by, erm, hitting it) I discovered that it won’t print anything. Oh, it thinks it’s printing, but nothing appears on the page. Even when the ink cartridges are full. Even after cleaning both sets of contacts and the ink intakes on the printer itself.

I did cross other things off my to-do list, but it was the kind of day where there wasn’t enough accomplished to account for the energy invested, and the grr of the hardware issues mightily outweighed the minor relief of crossing things off the list. So I got exactly no work done, other than sending an invoice for hours worked so far on the local freelance project I did before I left for Toronto. The boy’s thirty-eighth month post is late as a result. I can’t return a book to Amazon because I can’t print out the return form; I’ll have to beg Scarlet to print it out for me tonight.

Rawr. And gnarr.

The boy and I are running errands today. Wish us luck.