Thursday, October 20, 2016

Things that go BEEP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! in the night and make you say "WTH!?!?!?!?!?!" in the day

So, yeah... it's been an interesting week... actually one day in particular.

I know I've neglected this blog for a while. It's mainly because I couldn't think of any topics that were interesting enough to write about, but I definitely found one.

So, in general, this week has been crazy. I got a ridiculous request for a TPS report (because the actual content is not worth mentioning) that was a massive fire drill with a 24 hour turnaround time that I had to organize with minimal information. Equal parts frustration and confusion. All manual and in excel, and of course it involved gathering last second information from around 20 people.

That's not the "why" of this last Tuesday, October 18th was interesting... let me just count the ways.
Evil kitchen timer. But at the time it said 4AM

It's about 4AM. I hear a random alarm go off. Groggily, I wonder, "what the heck is that?!" After all, I already disabled BOTH my smoke detector and my CO sensor because I need new batteries...

I get out of bed and follow the sound... it's one of my kitchen timers. Odd, since I don't cook often and when I do, I don't use the timer! So I'm guessing I might have hit a timer that had a 16 to 20 hour countdown or something. Either way... UGH!

Then, after what felt like 30 min of sleep... my freaking digital radio started blasting at 5:36AM!!! I want to say I remember that it does this every so often, but I KNOW I turned it off the last time I used it because I transitioned from listening to the radio to watching tv. And it was off for at least 2 full days...
Haunted digital radio, but it said 5:36AM!

What a lovely way to start off the 2nd day of the 24 hour turnaround.

So I get to work, and of course, the usual happens. My computer freezes as I try to add an attachment to an email. I got a new computer a few months ago and it is ALWAYS freezing. I was patient and let it go. But after 20 min, I noticed that even the time had frozen on the computer, so I decided to force a restart.

Ok, yay, it's working! For now...

Should I expect the girl from Ringu to come out of this???
Not that long after, and I'm not sure if my chair touched the keyboard or not, but there is a window half flashing on my screen saying that I've been holding down the "Ctrl" button for a while and asking if I wanted to make some adjustments. So I try to push "cancel", then "ESC", but realize I just have to wait.

As I am looking at this POS, not touching anything, not the keyboard, not the mouse, not anything, my screen rotates 90 degrees. I look at it dumbfounded as I have not touched it!!

My coworker who has that set up purposely, walks by and I yell at him to help me fix this because, at this point... there is some weird energy around me.
#TBT to my Inktober days

He was able to fix it for me by using a shortcut, but shoot, that required at least 3 keys across the keyboard, so even if something was stuck, it didn't account for why the other keys would have been depressed without me touching anything.

So, yeah, if that wasn't enough... I go to my start menu and in the search box, I start seeing "-----------------------------------------------" as far as it can go and then some. I click out of it and then try my excel file, where again, I'm seeing "----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------" fill my cell, even though the only thing I'm touching is my mouse. I go into the IM system, and no matter where I click, you guessed it. I looked around to see if there was a something on there, but nope, nothing.

I think my computer is trying to tell me something...
The only way I can make it stop is un-docking my computer. I told my friend and he gave me a new keyboard. Funny thing is, the keyboard I had on there was also brand new. My cordless one ran out of batteries and I was using the corded backup. Just took it out of the box and plastic wrap just the week before.

So, technology has revolted against me. I had a ghost in my machines, following me. I'd like to say that all of it stopped on Tuesday, but I had a little more randomness on Wednesday too. Again, with the even  newer keyboard, (and luckily the TPS report delivered, so at least that stress was gone...), my computer started going crazy again. Again... without touching anything, my email kept scrolling to the bottom of my emails. I captured video of this, but decided not to post it just in case of any random liability.

And for some reason, the computer kept registering that the space bar was constantly being depressed. In the start menu search box, in my excel document... Only this time, when I un-docked, it kept going... (see blurry pic above)

I had to force a restart again. I know the full moon was just over the weekend, but it seemed to have residual effects for me...

Hopefully the poltergeist decided to haunt someone else today!




Let go of what is gone; be grateful for what remains; look forward to what is coming...

NOTE: Written on March 2, 2020: Pre knowing just how big Covid was... I decided not to rewrite it because it was a simpler time then.  Holy ...