Me and Windows NT
Just when I thought I had the next few days of my life all figured out, Friday night threw a major curve ball.
A huge lightning storm slammed Atlanta Friday afternoon. My cats were panicked, the sky was black, and I was madly running around the house unplugging anything electronic (blew a logic board once in a lightning storm, and vowed never to repeat). After the storm passed, the phone rang.
"Our whole computer network is down. The terminals won't boot. We're dead in the water."
The voice was my wife's boss at the restaurant she co-manages. Why he was calling me of all people was unclear, but then it hit me. This was Friday night. Mother's Day weekend. Graduation weekend. All the computer stores in town had already closed. Hundreds of reservations. The staff couldn't process credit cards, print receipts, send orders to the kitchen, etc. In other words, mass chaos.
He didn't know a thing about computers. Nobody did. Who does? Oh yeah, Heather's husband. He's a web designer, or something, right? Yeah! Call him!
So down to the restaurant I went. In their cramped kitchen, full of steam, spice, and workers screaming at each other in English, Spanish and Spanglish, was a neglected, dirty, grimy, 166mhz beige box and a tiny 256 color monitor sitting high on a shelf.
"I don't know a whole lot about Windows NT, " I told the boss. "I know everything about Macs, but Windows isn't my strongest suit."
"But can you fix it?" he asked.
His face was tight, panicked, and on the verge of needing a double shot of vodka. Without thinking, I said yes.
So off I went. Ripping out the hard drive, installing a new one, discovering that newer hard drives aren't recognized by NT 4.0, installing jumpers, partitioning, blah blah blah. By the time we hit midnight, it was clear the system wouldn't be ready that evening, but we could at least get it up before lunch on Saturday. Or at least we hoped.
With a 2 hour window before my wife's graduation, I went back to the restaurant early Saturday morning. Further investigation revealed lightning had fried one of their COM ports that the network was using. Replaced the card. Installed drivers. Reboot, reboot, reboot. Then the modem wouldn't work. Install more drivers. Reboot.
At the final minute before I absolutely had to go home and get dressed for the graduation ceremony and the after party, I asked the boss to reboot all the terminals, and swipe a credit card.
I walked out the front door to the sound of a receipt printing, and an astonished, speachless face on the boss. Not bad for a Mac guy.
Comments
Whoa, that is one big chunk of karma you have coming your way... Sad though, that you spent all that time that would've taken, what, an hour?, on a mac.
Posted by: jeremy w at May 12, 2002 10:41 AM
nt *shudder*
Posted by: circles. at May 12, 2002 10:56 AM
Jeremy: Exactly.
Posted by: Neil at May 12, 2002 11:42 AM
That's a good story -- and you did a great job telling it. My only worry now is that you will become their go to guy when people start screaming "oh-my-god-the-computers-won't-start-call-9-1-1". It's a troublesome spot -- the plight of the computer superhero. "With great power comes great responsibility." Or maybe I've been thinking too much about Spiderman.
Posted by: Paul at May 12, 2002 12:52 PM
Mr. Dominey, you are my new Mac hero. Forget Spiderman! That fellow can only climb walls and shoot webs.
Posted by: luis at May 12, 2002 1:05 PM
Sounds like by the time you were done a new computer would have been cheaper (if you had known what it eventually would take to get it running)! I'm also a mac user with a pc for browser testing so I admire your ability to diagnose a pc's problems. Too bad people don't know how much easier macs are to fix. That would probably be a great selling point.
Posted by: Lauri at May 12, 2002 1:33 PM
Great job, Todd!
And although I'm a mac fan, I don't think I can as assuredly say that Mac are easier to fix. It really depends on what's wrong with it. On the software side, yes, Macs have historically been much easier to troubleshoot. OS X changes things a bit (but, knock on wood, I haven't had one problem with X in the year I've been using/supporting it).
On the other hand I look over at my biege G3 and think "what if the serial ports got fried." Or that silly little audio card (I can't even remember what Apple called it now).
I look at my Cube and think what if the ethernet port got fried or the video card or the internal modem. I can't just run out and buy new ones.
Well, you get my point. What if Todd had arrived to find an iMac with a lightning fried internal modem?
Posted by: Scott M. at May 12, 2002 2:50 PM
Congratulations. Just make sure you do not catch yourself clicking the wrong end of the title bar. (this is when you will know for sure that you just spent too much time on a windows machine.)
Remember Nitzsche ìBeyond good and evilî (Spr¸che und Zwischenspiele 146) : ìWer mit Ungeheuern k”mpft, mag zusehn, daş er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abbgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in Dich hinein.î
ìOne who fights monsters should take care not to turn into one himself. And if you stare into the Abyss long enough, the Abyss will stare back into youî
So all I can say... Be careful. : )
Posted by: Witold at May 12, 2002 10:05 PM
I thought the last line would read .... "and they happily paid me a hundred bucks for saving their asses," at least! I guess it is your wife's place. Did they at least give you a couple of free meals?
Posted by: Andrew at May 13, 2002 4:47 AM
Re: "Did Did they at least give you a couple of free meals?
"
Yes. It's one of those unspoken, but understood relationships. I'm quite sure I have an open bar tab whenever I visit. :)
Posted by: Todd at May 13, 2002 8:53 AM
