The ways of technology are mysterious, but one rule that you can count on is that the chance of technology failure increases in direct proportion to the importance or need for that bit of technology.  When I turned my cell phone on at 7:45 this morning it almost immediately buzzed and beeped (causing me to nearly drop it), indicating that I had a voice message.  Since I tend to use the cell mostly for outgoing calls, it usually means that something’s gone wrong if I get a message on it.

A friend of mine had left me a message at 11:30 last night wondering if there was any way to recover a file.  She was working on her last paper (at least until grad school) and her laptop appeared to have lost it.  When I called her, it turned out to be worse than that.  The file was corrupted and portions of the paper were missing.  At that point, the only suggestion I could offer was to try to recover from the .TMP file left behind by Word.

I feel bad for her, because this laptop has been a pain since she got it about two years ago.  It’s a Sony Vaio that came preloaded with Windows ME.  It tends to freeze, it has trouble writing CDs with my Iomega Predator USB burner (the Predator worked fine on my laptop, though), and sometimes it doesn’t want to shut down (one time I had to pull the power cable and remove the battery pack to get it to stop).  I think the thing’s possessed by some kind of malevolent computing demon.

Now that school’s over, she’s asked me to reinstall it in the hopes that it will be more stable.  I’m going to exorcise that demon with a dose of XP and the latest BIOS updates and drivers.