Death Comes For Us All

Many great and wondrous plans for the past weekend, all of which were meant to get me back on track with work as I'm really tried of being behind. 

Lo, the laptop died. 

Shut down at work on Friday, no evidence of a problem.  Tried to boot the thing up Sunday and no joy.  Blue screen of death with the message "Registry cannot load the hive file".  Which means something in the registry got KO'd during the last shutdown.  Stupid thing just kept going blue screen - reboot - blue screen - reboot.  Many curse words were said.  I may have invented some new ones.    

I was able to get some work done from my home PC via Citrix but the majority of what I need is on the laptop.  Which is dead.  Brought it in today and handed it over to the tech guys that deal with that stuff.  Now according to Google all they need to do is boot from the XP disk and run a repair as this 'usually' works.  So I'm thinking "great - I'll have my code back in no time". 

No one can find the stinking disk! 

The tech guys that deal with this stuff decide they need to set up a new laptop for me.  I tell them fine but I need my files from the hard drive so when was the last backup.  The first answer I got was March 3.  What?  There's a process running the the background on the stupid thing that is supposed to be doing a back up of my files four times a week.  How could it have gone more than a month without doing a backup?  After much questioning the tech guys that deal with this stuff looked a bit deeper at the most recent backup and found files from April 7.  This news made me very happy as it means I didn't lose as much as we originally thought.  

I am currently doing email and not much else on a co-workers PC while I wait for my new laptop to be set up.  She doesn't do the same stuff I do so I'm missing almost all of my tools.  I should have the new machine today along with all my files from the last backup.  The hard drive from the dead machine is currently being decrypted and hopefully we'll be able to get the most updated files and anything that is missing from the backup.  It will take me another couple of days after I get the new laptop to get it all configured, of couse. 

So instead of being caught up after a weekend of diligently working on my projects I am now even further behind and currently sans computer.  Today is a wash, as will be tomorrow.  It will be Wednesday before I'm truly productive again. 

Meaning I'm even further behind than I was before.  Project Managers have been informed as have my boss and my tester.  I am amazingly calm, all things considered.  Either I'm getting better at handling stress or I've given up.