Stef came home to pick up her laptop. Within an hour of touching it she accomplished something I wasn’t able to–its CPU is running at a constant 100% again! No good. Tonight I will wipe that sucker clean and return it to its factory fresh state. I’ve already backed up her important documents and music.
Not every story ends tragically with a reformatting. I just got off the phone with my friend Mike in Nashville. I would crawl through the desert for Mike. He gave me my job here in Connecticut, but I look upon him the way Larry Sanders looked at Artie (Sorry–cryptic reference. If you haven’t seen the show, don’t worry.).
Mike had a problem with Microsoft Outlook. He couldn’t get at his email and though an error message told him to run scanpst, he couldn’t find that nor did he know what to scan once he did.
Why Microsoft can’t write this utility to be friendlier, maybe even autonomous, is beyond me. MS Office costs a lot of money and has been in development for years. Maybe the Apple commercial with the stacks of money for advertising and development is right?
I used LogMeIn’s phenomenal tech console to enter Mike’s PC. I’d done an entry about them for AppScout, so I have a demo account. You have no idea how much easier tech support is when you can just tell someone to go to a website, enter a pin and -voila- you’re controlling their machine while in pajamas!
After I found the file and rescanned Mike’s mail folder he opened Outlook. His email messages were intact. He sighed the kind of sigh of relief people reserve for hearing the doctor say, “It’s benign.” A burden had been lifted from his shoulders. I smiled.
I tried to relate the story to Stef. Maybe when I retire I’ll become a tech Johnny Appleseed–walking up-and-down Boynton Beach Boulevard fixing PCs for retirees. Nothing.
“Don’t you know the story of Johnny Appleseed,” I asked?
I explained how Johnny walked the roads carrying on his shoulder what, in the Fox house, is known as a “hobo stick.” He’d stop from time-to-time to plant an apple tree before moving on. Today we’d look at him as a strange homeless man and call the police.
That’s where I’m headed.