Murphy’s Law posits “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. A lesser known fact is that Murphy’s Law almost always coincides with a Monday.
This is a fundamental basis of our universe, alongside the truths that cats will always land on their feet and toast will always land butter-side down.
This Monday, May 3, is by far probably one of the most frustrating I’ve had in quite some time. For the first time since our July 31, 2019 edition I really thought there wouldn’t be a newspaper ready to hit post office boxes and newsstands on Wednesday. I’ll tell you, it wasn’t a good feeling.
And Monday actually started off pretty decent.
While I had my normal Monday anxiety about putting the newspaper together, I was fairly comfortable. My family and I had gone for a hike along the Encampment River Trail on Sunday morning and Sunday evening we had dinner with my parents. All together, not a bad way to end the weekend.
When I came into the office on Monday morning, however, I was given a rude awakening. I went about my normal routine to start the week; boot-up the computers, turn on the radio, make coffee and check emails once the computers were up.
Well, I got the coffee started and the radio worked just fine. Everyone else’s computers started just fine, too. Mine, however, wasn’t having it. I sat there, staring at the start-up screen and willing the progress bar to move to 100 percent. I tried to treat it like a watched pot and find other things to do. As it was my computer, however, there wasn’t much else I could do.
Even when the progress bar did reach 100 percent, which seemed to take forever, the start-up screen remained. The white Apple logo seemed to taunt me, almost telling me that it was the one thing standing between me and a productive Monday.
It wasn’t wrong.
I restarted the computer. I restarted the computer. I restarted the computer.
I lost track of how many times I restarted the computer. I tried to power cycle it and that didn’t even work. Luckily, I had my personal Chromebook and began to find out what I could possibly do to fix this issue.
By this time, I had already spent my entire morning restarting the computer and hoping it would make it past the start-up page and give me access to not just my emails, but the external hard drives attached to my computer as well.
The unfortunate thing was, even though everyone else could get on their computer, they couldn’t access the external hard drive that held our pages unless my computer was running.
Drastic times, however, call for drastic measures. The upside to an external hard drive is it is mobile. It moved three times on Monday. First to Amanda’s desk and then to Dana’s and then finally back to my computer.
Meanwhile, I ran checks on the hard drive and other external hard drives with flying colors and, yet, the computer still would not go past the start-up page. The words I uttered at this resistant piece of machinery cannot be printed and would have made a sailor blush. Still, the computer did not go past the start-up page.
I began typing up my articles on my Chromebook as I had to do the only thing I could think of: reinstall the Macintosh’s operating system. As I typed, I agonizingly watched the progress bar inch slowly forward. What I was told would be 45 minutes would end up being closer to two hours.
Finally, a process that began at 7:30 a.m. ended at 2:30 p.m. as the operating system successfully reinstalled and I was able to finally log into my computer and really get to work.
I really do need to talk to Murphy about this law, though. Surely we can pass an amendment so the law isn’t in effect on Mondays. And if you all could keep you fingers crossed that next week’s paper is just a little less stressful, that would be greatly appreciated.
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