The Blue Screen of Death

I have always been overly attached to my cell phone. An attachment that got to a whole new level during J's last deployment. If I was ever without my phone it most surely ended in a panic attack {{what if he called?!}} This deployment has been a little different. I'm still attached to my phone {{it even has a name}} but this time around, most of our conversing has been done on FB or through Google phone. I have both the apps on my phone but it's just soooo much easier to chat on a full size keyboard and so much easier to protect the camera from a two year old when it's able to sit flat on something, so I like to use the laptop more than my phone.

I have been having some issues with it lately and even told J recently that I need to back up the data so we didn't lose it all when it died for good. It's been crashing a LOT. It would freeze up and restart or the screen would go to a crazy, hot mess and all I could do was take the battery out, unplug it, and try again. I feel like I'm a relatively smart individual and for most things I am really good at figuring it out when I don't know how to do something. However, the thought of downloading something that could make it worse, resetting the system and losing everything unintentionally or doing worse harm to the computer kept me from Googling how to solve this issue. There are just some things you leave to professionals.

Yesterday, as I knew it eventually would, the computer got worse. It was doing the crazy-screen thing and randomly restarting when I asked too much of it, but it was also showing the Blue Screen of Death {{doomiest voice possible}}. Ok, that's a little dramatic. But it happened a good eight times. It would flash to this blue screen full of computer gibberish and at the bottom it said, "Crash Dump," Then it would restart and go to the crazy, hot mess screen {{these are computer terms, I checked}}. Let's talk about how frustrating it is to be in the middle of doing something INSANELY important {{like shopping}} and having your computer Blue Screen of Death you. Not only did it happen while I was online window shopping, but it also happened while I was blogging {{*gasp!*}} and it didn't even save. Things were serious. When the laptop restarted after that {{maybe the 9th time of the day}} I quickly Googled the number for Toshiba Support and made the phone call.

A woman named "Brenda Williams" answered the phone, catching me quite off guard as I had expected to spend at *least* twenty minutes on the phone with a machine before getting to speak to a live person {{the nerve of these companies having LIVE people answer their phones!}}. I'm fairly certain her name wasn't Brenda Williams. I'm actually fairly certain she's never even met anyone named Brenda Williams. Brenda Williams might have had the job at one time, before it was outsourced, but the lady I spoke with was most definitely NOT a Brenda Williams. She had very thick accent. I had to ask her to repeat things several times but she was very nice and very helpful. She assured me they could fix my laptop, that they could do it remotely so I wouldn't have to wait. She even gave me a {{small}} discount when I choked on my dinner when she told me how much it would cost to fix. After deciding I didn't really have a choice, I paid the nearly $200 {{I couldn't blog!! It was an emergency!!}} and she connected me to a technician remotely who spent the next three hours solving all of my computer problems.

I have been really concerned about taking it somewhere and having people go through all of the stuff on our computer... namely certain pictures I sent to my husband from the last deployment... So being able to watch Creepy "Tom" {{hey come on! It's creepy to watch your computer being controlled by someone who no doubt spent the rest of the night watching me through the camera!!}} was kind of... nice?

Then as he finished solving my Blue Screen of Death, I thought about those pictures. They were taken a while ago. Before kids and breast feeding...

Maybe we could have traded...