Death of a computer
Phew. Somehow I survived my first week in London, somehow being the operative word, because let’s just say things didn’t go entirely to plan 
I had been looking forward to staying in the Hilton because I figured we might get nice rooms, so I was quite surprised when I checked in on Monday night to discover that it was the second worst hotel room I’ve ever stayed in in my entire life. The fact that it was only a single bed didn’t bother me, because I am perfectly happy sleeping in single beds, but the fact that the room was only wide enough for a single bed and so I didn’t even get a bedside table, was rather a disappointment. The second thing which struck me as I entered the room was that there was a nice long window at the far end of it. I approached this and pulled back the curtain to see what sort of view I had, and this is what confronted me…
Yep that’s right, I had a beautiful view of the hotel restaurant 
As it was evening, the restaurant was full of people eating their dinner, all of whom were able to look straight into my bedroom and see me I found it a little unnerving, and was depressed by the fact that I had to keep the curtains completely closed all week 
The audit itself was as unpleasant as I expected the audit to be. The client was awkward from day one (when he refused to send out letters to his customers asking them to confirm their year end balances) to day four (when he refused to sign the report I’d written to say he agreed with it). I called my manager after this last objection to ask him what I should do. He suggested I “go upstairs and tell him to stop being a cock” 
My assistant was also a pain and I have decided he has an obsession with balls. Within the course of the week he frequently used such expressions as “I’m just doing some ballpark analytics” (I’m sure that’s not what I asked him to do!), “the client just threw a curve ball” (or perhaps a curved ball, I didn’t quite catch it), and “I enjoy playing hardball” (after which I got an uncontrollable fit of giggles and had to go to the toilet to text a colleague about how weird he was!).
He turned out, however, to be the least of my problems, because on Wednesday morning my computer tragically passed away 
I don’t know quite what happened. I had the piece of software we use for out audit files open, and I flicked to a spreadsheet. While I was looking at the spreadsheet, the audit software closed. I tried to open it again, but it’s a very cumbersome application and once it’s crashed, the only real solution is to reboot your computer. I duly did so, but as it was loading Windows again I got a strange error message saying it had been unable to load my personal settings. Initially I wasn’t too concerned by this, but then when I tried to log into Lotus Notes which is the software we use for our email, it wouldn’t let me. Never mind, I thought, and opened the audit software. That worked fine, so I carried on auditing. After a while I needed to open a spreadsheet so I clicked on it… and received an error message saying I didn’t have authority to open that document. I tried a different spreadsheet, I tried a word document, I tried a pdf… I couldn’t open any of them. I needed one of them rather badly so I tried to copy it to a memory stick for one of my colleagues to open. It told me I didn’t have authority to make a copy.
I turned the computer on and off five times, and when there was no improvement I called our technical support guy. He was about as helpful as technical support guys generally are, but eventually it emerged that because my computer had somehow failed to load my personal settings, it didn’t realise that I was myself and therefore it had encrypted all my data and wasn’t going to let me read it. The implication being that I was now incapable of opening any document which I had previously saved on my hard drive. Oh. Dear.
The tech guy wanted me to bring my computer in immediately, which my manager said I couldn’t do on account of me being in London. So in the end he told me I’d have to struggle on for the rest of the audit and bring the computer back into him on Thursday night. Initially he wasn’t going to provide me with a replacement computer, but my manager convinced him that I needed one, and last night I did indeed manage to go into the office and effect a swap.
In the meantime, though, life was rather difficult. Funnily enough, a lot of the documents saved on my harddrive were rather important, and thus for many of them the only solution was that they needed to be redone. By me, in my spare time. What fun! Let’s just say I skipped dinner on Wednesday night and I also skipped a lot of sleep and now I feel a bit sort of dazed and dead. I was so grateful that Babel had provided me with my own computer, because otherwise I would have been screwed. There was one point where I’d spent several hours writing an important word document, was totally happy with it, clicked save and was informed that I didn’t have the authority to save word documents. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I could then switch to my personal computer and type it out again from scratch, I don’t know what I’d have done!
Somehow, and I really have no idea how, the audit was nevertheless finished by Thursday afternoon. I got a certain amount of satisfaction when we arrived at Euston yesterday evening and met up with the other audit teams who were down for the week to compare notes. One of my colleagues had also been up half the night finishing her file but she hadn’t even written her important word document, and she hadn’t had to cope with the world’s worst assistant or a malfunctioning computer, so ultimately I felt a little bit smug 
It was still a horrible, horrible week though. I hope next week is a little calmer!
Tags: computer problems, London, Work