I'm proud to say that I'm writing this post from my laptop. She's not running on all of her memory, but she's plugging along. It was a harrowing day with Dell yesterday and I've just barely recovered from the trauma. Mommy needs a cocktail.

As promised by Dell customer service, the Dell guy came out and replaced my motherboard yesterday afternoon. It booted up fine (or so I thought) and I breathed a sigh of relief. There it was, my desktop with the forty million icons all over it. It truly was a thing of beauty.

I quickly rushed the Dell guy out the door so I could pet and coo over my little buddy. As soon as he was out the door, I carefully caressed the mouse. Nothing. My heart stopped cold. I wiggled and wiggled that mouse for all it was worth. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

"Ok, I'll just reboot", I thought. It didn't even get to the desktop this time. It froze while trying to load Windows.

"Ohhhhh Kayyyyy, let's try booting in safe mode", I said outloud. I hoped that my little buddy would hear all of the trouble I was going through to get her little heart started. Again, it froze up.

Just for good measure, I tried to reboot it again in safe mode. It froze up in the exact same spot. One of the drivers wouldn't load.

I dialed the number to Dell and proceeded to wait for 20 minutes before customer service finally picked up. It was a guy named Alexander who had a headset with a problem and a heavy Russian accent. A recipe for a migraine.

I told him what had happened, mentioning where exactly it was freezing up. He said, "Do you mind if we reformat your hard drive?" Whhhaaaaattttt? He asked me if I backed up, and I replied "of course". Big fat lie. I haven't backed up in like three months. He then tried to get me to reformat my hard drive again. I wouldn't bite.

I was on the phone for just over two hours with Alexander. I think it might of been his first day. Really. There were several times that I wanted to seriously beat the living crap out of him. Mostly it was when I heard him say "interesting...." after telling him what happened when I'd try out another one of his theories.

Finally, at the end of this two hour marathon, he said, "Let's try one last thing". Wouldn't you know it, that 'one last thing' was the winner. One of my memory cards was bad. It's on the way in the mail.

Several things made me believe it was his first day, but I think the last conversation we had confirmed it. He unsuccesfully tried to transfer me to their quality control department. When he couldn't figure it out, he asked me if I would call back and when a customer service rep answered I was to tell them to transfer me to their quality control department. I told him that there was NO way I was going to be on hold for another 20 minutes. He checked with his supervisor and I was let off the hook.

As soon as I got off the phone with Alexander, I backed up every stinking thing on my computer. That, and checked in the mirror for cauliflower ear.