a clean start.

At work, I have been issued a Thinkpad R51 that has - to put it mildly - seen better days. It’s not a bad machine, but it runs Windows, and that (through some unseen force of nature) means that it has problems.

And when I mean problems, I mean Blue Screens Of Death. All the time. So my Help Desk people have tried to fix it, but without any noticable success. I don’t blame them for this; Windows is like that. (This is one reason I switched to Linux and Macs.)

Yesterday, however, they did something so unspeakably diabolical, so fiendishly clever, that my mind boggles. They took my computer away to install some drivers, and when it came back…

… it was clean.

Not just a little clean, mind you. Clean clean. Sparkling clean. Screen was clean, case was clean, keyboard was clean…

Dumbfounded, I tell you. It’s like when you go in to get your oil changed and they wash and clean your car; everything about the car is better, even though it’s just had some fluids replaced.

As an aside, why did dealers stop doing this? VW Springfield only does this if I blow a whole bunch of cash on repairs, and if they had time. Back in Texas no dealer ever let a car off the lot if it wasn’t washed first. It was something that just wasn’t done.

Apparently, different rules apply in DC.

Now here’s the telling thing: even though the computer is still broken, I am completely happy to work with these guys as long as it takes, because they’re giving me things that I didn’t realize I wanted.

Like, a nice, shiny computer to show off that BSOD.

(It’s the little things that make us happy.)