The Office Computer Meltsdown

Well, it happened again-the office computer has joined "Lappie" in ole computer Heaven. We came in on Tuesday and found the office computer unresponsive and without a glimmer of life. Pandora Steve tried to resuscitate it with CPU CPR but we were unable to save it.

You would think that after the motherboard meltdown of my laptop last month, we would have taken the precautions of backing up important stuff and saving all of our files and folders onto disks...but no..we didn't! That task was on my ever growing "To Do Someday When I Get Around To It List". For the most part, the only important things on the computer were the Knitwits mailing list and our library of patterns.

Without access to the current mailing list, we were unable to send out a weekly e-mail. I have a new mailing list in the works so we'll make next week's e-mail specials extra extra special. Hopefully, our new computer will have arrived and we'll be able to figure out how to use it.

Being technologically challenged makes dealing with anything computer related very difficult. When trying to decide what computer to buy to replace our old workhorse, Janet and I first selected a Dell Inspiron that came in great designer colors-we liked Tangerine.

Well, we were told that buying a computer because they looked fun wasn't always the best way to go and we would have to wait too long to get it. So, we decided to go cheap and "down and dirty"- our new HP desktop has no bells, whistles and no designer colors.

Next, the task of retrieving our mailing list was painfully agonizing. We knew we had it stored somewhere in cyberspace-but where? Our provider had no record of any on-line back up service. I scoured every piece of paper, statement and bulletin board full of notes for clues as to it's whereabouts. Nothing! Comair Steve had taken care of this and he was unavailable.

Our new POS system keeps customer names and -mail addresses, so I figured that would be the place to start building our new mailing list. But, how do you get all 1000 names and addresses into your e-mail address book? Well, trust me--importing, exporting, sorting, templating and trying to understand what "as easy as 1-2-3" instructions ain't easy!

We may have lost a few names and current e-mail addresses, but I think we're well on our way to having a new mailing list. If we pester you for your name and e-mail address over and over again, please bear with us. If you don't get our e-mails, please let us know. If you get a bunch of the same e-mails, I'm testing the new e-mail system and again-please bear with us. We're Knitwits!

Being a techno-geek, computer nerd is too hard and not fun, I'm looking forward to getting my life as a knitter/sky waitress/blogger back.