Dell Hell or La vie n'est pas une longue fleuve tranquille

Please, learn from my mistakes. Stop whatever you’re doing (probably the only time I’ll ever ask anyone to stop reading my blog) and get out your external hard drive and back up EVERYTHING right now. If you don’t own an external hard drive, go immediately to your favorite online or brick-and-mortar store and buy one. Then, BACK UP EVERYTHING. And do it often.

2007 has gotten off to a hellish start. But I like to take the optimist’s view and imagine that since I’m accumulating all these catastrophes in January, the rest of the year is going to be smooth sailing.

Cross my fingers, knock wood, etc.

I’ll spare you all the gory details, because not only are they depressing but they are so over-the-top as to be unbelievable. I’ll try to stick just to the barebones facts.

Some of the shitty things that have happened to me since my last posting:

1) I rebroke up with Jerome. Of course, many of you didn’t even know that things were back on with Jerome, which is just as well. But they were for a short period, but then I had to put an end to it again. And whatever your stance on this relationship is or has been, know that it’s been the hardest break-up of my life and the mourning period is not over yet. So that’s a real load to deal with already.
2) I fell and hurt both my knees. In some sort of dim-witted rush move, I managed to entwine myself in my luggage at the Gare de Lyon and fall hard onto the pavement, ripping my pants, opening up one knee and badly bruising both. Of course this happened at 7:25 am as I’m trying to catch the 7:30 train…
3) Somehow that fall appears to have affected my laptop, safely ensconced in my backpack, which although it did not hit the ground, apparently smacked hard enough against my person to kill the hard drive. And when I say kill, I mean that my hard drive died a horrible death. The noises it made when I tried to get my computer to work remind me of descriptions I’ve read of pigs being led to slaughter.
4) Because of point 1, I hadn’t done a full back-up of my laptop in several months. I know, stupid, stupid, stupid. But every time I thought of getting out the external hard drive, it made me think of Jerome, the computer fanatic, who made me buy this external hard drive and even wrote a personalized macro for me so that the back-ups would go as quickly and painlessly as possible. And of course, that made me sad.
So I kept putting it off.
If I had known how sad I would be when I learned that nothing was recoverable on my hard drive, I would much rather have had a little heartbreak backing up my hard drive every night compared to this disaster of huge personal and professional proportions.
HAVE YOU MADE THAT BACK-UP YET?
Imagine losing everything, everything. Your emails, your documents, your taxes, your photos, your amusing blog texts in preparation, everything...
Now make that back-up and you don’t even have to thank me for it.
5) I had to go through an entire week of angry phone calls, emails and online exchanges to get any satisfaction from Dell despite having a valid 3-year “Complete Care” contract with them. Now that I have gotten full satisfaction from them, I won’t go on an anti-Dell rant like I was planning to for several days. Although the next time I need a new laptop, I think I’ll take a long, hard look at Hewlett Packard…
6) I got the worst, most wicked case of food poisoning ever, causing me to vomit in the metro and then all night long chez moi. Nuff said.

Of course, all of this happened during the busiest month for work that I’ve had in ages. While normally lots of work is good news, the timing couldn’t have been worse, and I’ve had to scramble like crazy to not piss off my regular clients completely.
And, various other little emmerdes have cropped each week as well, making this by far the nastiest January I’ve ever had.
But, I reiterate my positivism and remain hopeful that things can only get better...
Pray for me.
And back up your hard drive now!!!

Peace on earth, goodwill toward men...

and of course, Happy New Year!!
This morning, my 2007 horoscope says the following:

This is the year that you have been waiting for as your key planet, Jupiter, makes its once-every-twelve-years return to your sun sign, bestowing grace and opportunity onto your life.
As the Archer, you aim your arrows of intent high; your targets are often far in the distance. Now you can see even further, and your power is even stronger. Jupiter's influence works like a magnifying lens by making your life even bigger. But you like grandiosity, so this will feel quite comfortable, even familiar.
There are other planetary influences this year, but jovial Jupiter in your sign -- from Nov. 23, 2006, until Dec. 18, 2007 -- will likely be the most obvious and should provide a fortunate underpinning for a very successful year. Jupiter was last in your sign in 1995, which may have been the beginning of the opportunity cycle that is currently coming to a close.
You see good news now everywhere you turn...