The longest day...

I would have blogged about this earlier, but seeing as the story came to it's close at midnight last night and I worked today this is the best I can do. I am mostly blogging about this to vent. I generally have a love/hate relationship with computers, and yesterday was a hate day for the computer.

I got a vinyl cutter last month and then after it arrived I ordered some vinyl for it. The vinyl didn't come, and didn't come, and didn't come. Finally I called the company to find out what was going on and the lady looked up my order and it was "never processed." I was a little frustrated, but she next day aired it to me so that made up for it I guess. I was so excited when it arrived on Tuesday that I went to work testing out the fun new toy. I loaded all the software on the computer, which like any software is not always an easy task, but I followed all the directions and got going. Once it was all loaded up and ready to go I put in some words and sent it to the cutter. Nothing happened, then the computer said "port error." What the heck does that mean? Being the independent do-it-yourselfer that I am I thought, I can google that and see what other people will tell me to do to fix it. Nothing worked. After trying every suggestion for about 2 hours I remembered that I got free tech support for 90 days. Sweet, I will call them and have them fix it for me. But no, they are on the east coast and at that point it was after 5 here, so I would have to wait for wednesday.

Wednesday morning dragged until I could call them. I sat on hold for 20 minutes (of course) and then I got someone on the line to help me. I turned the computer over to him (by the way, that is a weird thing to have someone else using your computer like that, the mouse moves on its own. Creepy...) It didn't take him long to pronounce that the problem was Vista. Apparently the software I had was not compatible with Vista. He said, "Honestly ma'am I am surprised that you even got it to work this much, it shouldn't have installed at all on the computer." Two things come to mind from this: #1 ma'am? how old did he think I am? and #2 well obviously the program works somewhat with vista seeing as I am no computer genius. Oh well, so he said that I had two options, I could either downgrade my computer to XP or use a different computer. I opted for the latter and went through the process of installing the software on the laptop and transferring the internet connections. But, hey wouldn't you know, it still didn't work! This time the error was different. It said: write port error. Can anyone tell me what a port is? and how do you write it, because I still don't know! This meant I had to call tech support again.

This time the wait on hold was only a few minutes which was nice, but the conversation lasted almost a half hour. He took over my computer and tried to no avail to get the program to work. He had me unplugging things and asking me all kinds of technical questions that I had no clue as to what he was asking me to do. I felt like an idiot. His final thought was to download an upgrade to the program and see if that corrected the error. The file was over 500 MB! I thought okay fine, no problem. Heck if it didn't take 7 hours for that file to download! (So much for "high speed" internet connections.) Then once it was done I somehow figured out how to extract the updates from the new file and send them to the program. It was a miraculous intervention, seeing as it was almost 11:30pm and I was sick and tired of the computer at this point. I did a test cut and nothing happened!!!!! I was about to throw the computer out the window. Then a thought entered my mind to change the set up of one thing in the program and try again. When I did a test cut that time I was so surprised by the machine coming to life that I jumped. It worked! Andrew started laughing at me and said that he was glad that it finally worked since he was begining to think I was going to lose my mind. Little does he know I lost it a long time ago ;) Anyways, long story short it works! and I hope I never encounter such problems again (mostly because I can think of much better ways to spend a day!)