Brennig Jones (and friends)

Crash 1:
This morning my 18-month old Dell laptop refused to get out of bed and boot up. Again. You may remember it went tits up (to use the technical phrase) in October. This morning the bios started up but before it could draw breath it told me it was giving up what it was supposed to do because of a major shit problem. That’s not the precise error message but you get the picture. There was no Windows splash message, no nothing, just a screenful of 8-bit fatal error message. When I got in to the office I called Dell and explained, in words of one syllable, that I am a corporate account and that two such fatal failures on a mission-critical piece of hardware in less than 24 months are way beyond completely fucking unacceptable. The bottom line is that Dell are sending an engineer out to me tomorrow.

Crash 2:
On the way home this evening I saw an interesting accident just here. You see where the car is approaching the Give Way sign painted on the road junction? Well just there was a car transporter, one of those lorries that carry 8 cars, 4 on a lower deck and 4 on an upper deck. The lorry had been fully laden. It had evidently come banging down the road towards the junction much too quickly (the map doesn’t show it very well, it’s quite a steep downwards hill), realised he had to stop or slow, slammed his brakes on and the car at the front of the top deck slid half off, smashed backwards in to the cab of the lorry then crashed on its nose in to the road, then the lorry squashed it and ran over it. Messy. There were no other vehicles involved and the driver was shocked, but unhurt. But oh boy, the road was a total mess. It was all the more dramatic being dark, orange flashing lights on the recovery vehicles, blue flashing lights on the police car.

Crash 3:
As a result of Crash 1, I was running around the house like a headless chicken, before I left for work, trying to find my Windows and Office installation CDs. I failed in the finding. And I took it out on Sophie, in a snarling kind of way. Totally inexcusable. I spent the rest of the day feeling like shit because of my behaviour. The reason – look, I know that this is pathetic – is because Sophie is a manic OCD-er. Things vanish which is a two-way euphemism for being tidied. There’s no excuse for my behaviour, though. Completely unacceptable. Anyway, this evening I found the CDs so I’m prepared for Mr Dell to arrive and replace the motherboard and whatever else needs replacing. Yes the CDs had been tidied but I think the wider point is that I need to be far more organised in how and where I put things in the first place. So I’m going to work on that and I’m going to work on it with maximum effort. Because putting things somewhere and expecting them to be there a couple of months later might work for me, but it’s potentially unacceptable for the person I live with.

Still growing up, see?