My Computer...

Before I left for the Peace Corps, my mom's office very generously gave me a laptop they no longer needed to take with me to be able to stay in touch with home. This was the most amazing gift ever! During my first few months in country, I used it almost everyday. I prepared stuff for my blog, saved pictures, listened to music, you name it. Then, tragedy hit.

As some of you know, in August – less than 2 months into my time here, I killed my lovely laptop. I am fully accountable for the death of it, too. I know very little about computers, but, for some reason, I decided that I could manipulate it to make it do what I wanted to do. Not so. Instead, I manipulated it into a very scary error screen that included the word “panic”. Great.

After following its advice and panicing, I tried everything to fix it. I even called my sister in America – who does know something about computers – to see if she could help. No success.

I called the Peace Corps IT guy. He said he'd be happy to look at it. So, I sent it to him in Baku, and waited. Now, in the advertisements for Peace Corps, they remind you quite frequently how important patience is. I sent my computer to him in the beginning of August, thinking he would look at it and – hopefully – fix it within a few weeks. 3 months later, I heard back from him. The people at the Apple store could indeed fix it. Yay!!! But, it would cost me 100 manat. Boo!!!!! 100 manat is about 115 dollars – and, as a volunteer, that amount seems exorbitant, and, quite honestly, impossible. I politely said no thanks, and got my completely useless computer back.

My amazing sister Kate again tried to talk me through ways to make it work again. And then she, and my mom, and who knows how many people at PRD, hunted and found the disks to try to reset the computer and mailed them to me. The fisrt attempt, in late November, was only semi-successful. The computer finally got off that very scary error screen, but it was in a really old version of the operating system, and no longer had any of the programs I actually used.

Take two. They hunted again and found updated disks and promptly put them in the mail. I received the package today. A combination of nerves and excitement filled me. What if it didn't work? Oh, please, please, please let it work. Insert disk, click on a few accept boxes, wait as it did stuff, and, voila! Magic. It worked!

So, now I have a working laptop, with all of the programs I need. I can write, save my pictures, listen to music, you name it. YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hopefully, for all of my devoted fans, this means that I will be able to write stuff for my blog more frequently. I can't guarantee that I'll be able to get it posted in a very timely fashion – better internet acccess is my next step in this process – but at least I can get it written.