This is a long sad story about bailouts and computers. If it was a fairy tale it would be by the Brothers Grimm.
A long time ago, Feb 2008, all was good in my world and then I got a BSOD on my PC. I hadn’t seen one of those for so long I almost forgot what it was. The housing market was having a few problems, just like my computer but I expected everything to work out well, in the end.
So, much like the finacial markets I ran some tests on my PC and tryed to figure out how to resolve the problem. Same as the financial invetment places were trying to figure out how to solve theirs. I ran scan disk and it found a few bad sectors and fixed them but when I ran diagnostics it said drive failure was imminent. Just like the finacial house knew their end was imminent if they didn’t do something.
So I decided to fix my problem once and for all by ordering a new hardrive for my laptop. No big deal, I knew it would gix the problem. Having been burned by ordering from the net before I did a lot of research to find the drive I knew woud work. I finally found one and was confident my fix would work as it was just take the old one out and plug in the new one. Simple, just like the bailout except I thought mine out a bit more than congress did.
I had a handle on the problem so I ordered delivery with 5 day ground. Much to expensive to have it overnighted. Congress kinda overnighted the bailout plan tho but I was smarter than that. So my brand bew bailout hard drive arrives. Now I have to figure out how to get everything from my old hard drive to my new one. Microsoft backup just wouldn’t do so I went and bought some software to image my disk with. Oops, so far the bailout is limping along but I’ve had to spend more money and that was unexpected.
Now my bailout is over budget and already the timeline is screwed. My drive got a few more errors and I ran scandisk and repaired them and all was good except my work wasn’t getting done and my hard drive wasn’t getting fixed. I had the cure but couldn’t figure out how to make it work.
Disk image went well and I had the original drive backed up(imaged) now all I needed to do was to stick the new hard drive in and I could put the image on the new disk and be up and running as is nothing had ever gone wrong.
Naturally the screws on the holder for the old drive wouldn’t come out. For some reason there are always unforseen problems, just like a real bailout, but I had the tools to solve that problem so I opened up my set of seldom used computer tools and after a couple of days of fighting with it I finally got the screws out. However I’ve also been working so now I need to reimage my disk so I don’t lose anything. Arghhhh. Congress shoud have stopped and reimaged the bailout too.
So I get the new image made and get the new drive screwed into the holder and I insert it in the slot in my laptop and I’m thinking cool, this was pretty easy so far. Wi9th some small problematic exceptions the hard drive bailout is moving ahead. Lol, just like the real bailout, slow, jerky and uncertain, but, moving.
So I reboot and nothing happens except an error telling me there is no hard drive to boot from. Uh oh. Me and congress have something in common. A bailout that didn’t work on the first try. For me, simple stupidity, same as for congress. Obviously I didn’t know what I was doing and neither did congress.
So I pull the new drive out and compare it to the old one. Hmmm, seems the drive has a different connector than my current drive. Damn fools where I got it much have sold me the wrong one. Kinda like the treasury sold congress on a poorly thought out scheme to save the countires financial markets. Screw the consumers, help the big banks screw the consumers some more.
So, now I have a problem I can’t fix, at least not quickly and not without more information. So I scoured the net for what I could be doing wrong and found nothing. Now unlike congress, I know something is wrong so I keep looking. In the meantime I run defrag and f disk frequently and manage to keep the old hard drive hobbling along. Of course I’m loosing a lot of productive time and it’s costing me big bucks to not be able to use my computer. Lol, remind you of the big banks loosing money on bad loans and bad decisions.
After limping along for 7 months the hard drive finally died the other days so now I had to fix it. Heh, our economy died a year ago but congress didn’t seem to realize it. At least I knew I had a problem even if, like congress, I didn’t know how to fix it. I did keep it limping along but not at a rate I could do anything at. Just like consumer credit.
Monday I finally went to the experts with the old drive, the new drive and a big question. What kind of interface is on my old HD and why doesn’t my new one match it? What do I need to make a new HD work in my PC. Seems like more wuestions than congress had about the bailout. Of course I have to pay for my bailout by myself so maybe that’s why I was more careful.
Anyway, the expert took on look at my two drives, pulled hard on the end of the original and something came off. He then stuck it on the pincs on the new drive and told me, “There, now it should work.” Sheesh, my own stupidity kept me from being as productive as I could have been and my own lack of knowledge cost me about 25 workdays since the first occurence.
Now on my part after a little tweaking, my pc is as good as it was before the HD started to go bad. I didled around, with a lack of expertise, and ended up costing myself a lot of money.
How much has the congress lack of knowledge and diddling around cost you with this poor bailout plan. I got my bailout to work, will congress ever get theirs to work?
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