Whoa da Machine

see this.... This...............is............the BLACK (not blue) screen of death

not good....

This causes involuntary jazz hands.. and utterances of words (not befitting a kindly grandmother).... and as if in a bad slo-mo nightmare the five stages of grief take hold and consume the next 24 hrs of your life.

• Denial: the initial state "This can't be happening"(how many reboots with the same screen does it take to figure out "it's happening baby)

• Anger: Why is this happening "looking around wildly for someone to blame"

• Bargaining: Oh Hell! just let me get my Quickbooks back! I don't care about anything else....(Oh yeah? wadda 'bout those ten thousand photos....)

• Depression: Wandering aimlessly around the kitchen periodically opening the refrigerator door, helping yourself to 'yet' another ice cream sandwich, waiting for the techie guy to call for a "computer update".

and last...

• Acceptance: Highly jubilant acceptance, looking thru the Dell flier that has been littering the computer desk for weeks. Hmmmm, that certainly is a fine looking lime green laptop with a 17" in screen.... Just the thing to help one thru a tragic computer disaster.

Cell phone rings while making a purchase at the local Farm Supply store. Techie guy in need of Norton's Utility password to load it back on my computer.

"You fixed it?" I inquired.....

"Well, I got your Windows OS back, but everything else is gone"

So there you have it.....I have my trusty (old) Toshiba laptop back . A pristine, blank-slate, little program-less virgin......

as visions of a shiny new greener than green, 17" screen, bad boy named Dell, fades to

well, black