Notes from the computer graveyard

Posted by: Meredith Whittaker, Program Manager

I'm running late for work, the trains are packed. I arrive at the office a little winded, set down my coffee and open my laptop. Hello? Laptop? Try that again: close and open my laptop. No go. Shoot. I manually restart, plug and unplug; I change power outlets and restart again. Nothing.

And so it is, 20 minutes later I'm at the tech stop (our IT department), my laptop declared dead on arrival.

"How long will it take to get me a new machine?" I ask.

"That depends," Fernando, one of our IT gurus responds. "If you have a lot of files on the hard drive, it could take a day or so to transfer them over...if we can get to them. But, if you don't need much from the original computer, then we can get you up and running in a few hours."

Now, there were some music files, and a random PDF or two that I wanted. But, by and large, my important documents were all on Google Docs. So, while Fernando set up my new machine, I was able to work, business as usual, from the clunky loaner-computer.

Waiting at the tech stop for a morning isn't my idea of an amazing party, but since my documents were online and accessible, it didn't have to be the definition of a total time sink, either.