Alive Anonymous "A place for help on the season breaks."

The story of a prednisone induced psychosis or the OS on my laptop has achieved self-awareness.
(I’m really hoping for the psychosis)


No spoilers at all.

This has not been the year for me and electronic devices. I’ve dropped, stepped on and drove over my own cell phone not once but twice. Thank the gods I invested in a military grade, yes I said it, military grade cellphone after my youngest kid murdered six phones in six months. The salesman swore to me I couldn’t kill this phone. He was right. Oh and thank God for insurance.

I tend to carry maximum insurance on all my electronic things because of the children… They aren’t kind to things especially when the things are mine. I hope all three of my kids have children exactly like themselves I do I really do… Ok but I digress back to the story.
I splurged a month ago on a laptop. I decided I wanted to take a more active role in being online and maybe consider going back to school for my next degree. None of these ideas are possible when you share a desk top with two other people who both are students.
So off I go to the place where everyone knows my name… my neighborhood Office Depot. I spend a great deal of time in this place, also a great deal of money. Normally the money is spent on debugging my desk top of all things related to porn… the joys of living with an eighteen year old human male.

I get this sweet deal a nice lap top with as much hard drive as my desk top plus a lovely 4g of RAM all for the sweet price of 400$ with a 50$ mail in rebate. I’m stoked because they also have insurance….

The insurance is the best; everything replaced no questions asked etc, etc... you all know the drill. So I get this laptop cleaned up of all spam ware. I get a Word program loaded onto it for an extra 100$ and off we go. I take my new baby home only to realize… I need a wireless router and back I go to Office depot. They do love me there they really do. I get a wireless router and back I go home.
I “allow” my son to set up my wireless router. When I say allow him to set it up I mean, I went to cook dinner and he ripped open the box to “help” me and attempted to master the router and set it up in a manly fashion meaning he tossed the directions to the side. It took me an hour and a half to uninstall the D link and reinstall it and voila!!! It worked!!!! Directions are a cool thing.

My laptop is awesome, the stuff of dreams I’m surfing the net I discover Skype etc. then I loan my daughter my computer. My computer was 2 weeks old when it fell off the couch and shattered its screen. I’m still in mourning but hey I have insurance which I failed to read the fine print on and it will take 10 weeks TEN freaking weeks to get my full money back. I’d gotten used to being free to surf the net on my own without having some nagging person standing behind me saying “ I have a test or I wanna check my email” so I with great sadness buy another laptop.

It’s not as cool, or as slick running but it’s as close to the murdered laptop as I can get and I get more insurance. I’m not accepting of this new laptop and it’s not happy with being my new computer too. I think it knows it wasn’t my first choice and resents me for it.
Let us fast forward to yesterday…. It’s been a month lots and lots has happened. It’s now full winter and I’m prone to lung infections. I work with sick people go figure. So after a month of being sick I go to the doctor and get placed on my least favorite drug in the entire world….. Prednisone, for you all that don’t know this is a heavy duty common steroid used for inflammation of the tissues or in my case the lungs. I like breathing so I don’t argue with the doctor when she in her vast knowledge and wisdom writes me a script for 3 times the dose per day then I’ve ever taken before. Prednisone has a strange effect on me. The common effect is a rabid case of the munchies… but no not me I’m unique and I’m wired for radio when I take it…

So me on prednisone is like a 2 year old on sugar and a Redbull. I’m off the charts crazy and as its 3 times the dose it’s 3 times the fun. I turn on my computer and my four year old wants to go to bed with a cartoon. I turn on Netflix and he and I lay down to watch a cartoon while he goes to sleep. All perfectly normal when my strange laptop starts making a clicking noise… I’m all like “WTF now is this stupid thing going to do” I investigate the noise and in the process I get a “new” screen. Not blue but black. I’ve since learned that black screens can be worse than blue screens. I’m in full panic mode I can’t hard boot and nothing is responding so I pull the battery and turn the computer off. J0be would have been proud of me here. When it comes back on, the flipping thing tells me it can’t find its hard drive and it gives me a web address to “trouble shoot” what’s going on. I got to thinking afterwards… how the F do you trouble shoot if you didn’t have a second computer?

I put the laptop through every test I know and the HP web page tells me to do and I determine that the hard drive is blown and the computer won’t even reboot.
Sadness utter sadness so I take the laptop back to the Office depot this morning… I see my favorite tech, she cringes when she sees me…
Adrianna: “Oh no what happened?”

Me: “Its dead the hard drive is dead” I thrust the corpse of the computer at her and I proceed to tell Adrianna what’s happening and everything I’ve done to come to this conclusion.

Adrianna: “Let’s not panic. It might just be a virus.”

I love her she knows my history well. It’s normally always a virus.
I watch as my favorite tech sits down with my laptop on her lap and she turns it on. My freaking laptop turns on and boots up . . . normally…. FREAKING normally…..

Adrianna looks at me expectantly. I have no answers as my laptop glows happily and normally.
I’m sent to pace the store because I’m hovering. Adrianna takes my computer to the work station and she performs something she call a virus scan at this point I call it “magic”.
Forty minutes later she tells me there’s nothing wrong no virus no hard drive damage nothing… it’s a happy laptop…. Her last words to me were. “Maybe it’s just messing with you?”

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