sidetracked (lyn)

The date begins with promise.  I awake at 6am and it is dark.  I decide to go for a 3.6-mile walk/run.  Surprisingly, Alexander is already up studying for an AP Economics test.  He asks me if it’s safe in the park this early, and I tell him that since Sunday is the NYC Marathon I should be fine.

I reach the park around 6:20 and the sun is nowhere in sight.  But it is well lit with lanterns, and I see many runners and bikers on the outer road.  I run up the small ramp leading to the reservoir and it is deserted.  I decide to forge ahead anyway.   It is so dark that I race straight through the leftover puddles from the prior two days of rain.  I’m faster than usual; it’s my fear of some menacing creature surprising me from the bushes.  I’m home before daybreak, and feel great.

Around noon, I email Shari with an attachment.  She doesn’t receive it.  I also don’t receive the copy I send myself.  I try again.  No luck.  I reboot my computer.  I still can’t send the attachment.

I decide to go out and run some errands, hoping that when I come home the problem will somehow be solved.  It isn’t.  I call Apple.  I’m on with Jason for 28 minutes.  He puts me on hold to check something, disconnects me, and calls back.  We troubleshoot a few more things, and he gives up.  Says he’ll transfer me to a ‘product specialist’ who can help me further.  He disconnects me again, but this time forgets (or maybe chooses) to not call back.   I so hate computer problems.

I call back and I’m on the phone with very-nice Ryan (for the first 90 minutes).  We test a million things and discover that I can send and receive mail, send and receive non-Word attachments, and even receive Word attachments.  But I cannot send an email with a Word document attachment.

Ryan - and this is when things turn a little less pleasant (but still so much fun)- concludes that the problem is with Microsoft Word and not Apple and that I need to contact them.  But I can never reach them!  I hate them!  My Office 2004 is out of warrantee and I’d have to pay to get help!  I plead.  I beg.  I cry.  Nothing works.  Ryan can no longer help me.

But then he gets another idea.  He really is trying.  He sends me an email with some free program that will scan documents and tell me if they are infected.  So I scan a few Word documents and they are all infected with some micro virus.  The good news, Ryan tells me, is that it doesn’t affect the rest of my computer.  Just my Word documents.  Of which I must have a million, at least.  Such good news!

It’s now been over three hours since I first called Ryan.  More than 90 minutes on the phone with him.  Another half hour doing a free scan that just identifies all my corrupt files…too many to count.  And another hour searching the internet for good anti virus programs for a Mac that are compatible with Snow Leopard.  So far I haven’t found any.

So my documents still have a virus.  I don’t know how to make them better.  And I have zero appetite.