Oh, the frustration of computers

In my day job life, I need Outlook. I live by Outlook. A few days ago, Outlook on my work laptop starting perpetually claiming to be “Disconnected” even when it had no good reason to claim that. As far as I could tell, though, none of my other apps were messed up.

So I took it to IT and asked for help, and it clearly had them stumped. For hours, the VP and director of IT worked on trying to get Outlook to behave normally. When I got my laptop back, Outlook worked, but a lot of other stuff was messed up. They’d performed some sort of broad-scale restore process that wiped out my system preferences, a good many installed applications (like Life Balance, which I use to manage my time and priorities), and all kinds of odds and ends like Firefox bookmarks and add-ons — that sort of thing.

Believe me, I’m grateful that Outlook works again, but man, trying to get things back to some semblance of normalcy has been a real productivity killer and extremely frustrating. I don’t even have a complete picture of what’s not working — I discover it as I go, like when I tried to sync my Treo just now and found out that all the Palm software was gone. Gah!

Again, I am grateful for what works — I just wish I’d known there would be such far-reaching consequences to taking my laptop to IT. I would have backed everything up. I guess I’ll know to do that next time.

Ah well. Back to the tedious process of restoring my programs.