I didn't ask for this job... or did I?

Today started out great. I slept in until 8:00, coffee was hot when I wanted it, Aletha was in a really good mood even though she had to go to work. All was right with the world.

Then I began my every-other Saturday ritual ... running maintenance on my computer. Now I know a lot about computers, but I am not an IT person, what ever that means. I think it stands for "introspective thinker" which of course, I am not. Or maybe it stands for "Idiotic Timing" which is definitely a strong trait of mine.

After running Ultimate Troubleshooter, I was still having glitches on the Internet, so I ran another program that has worked great in the past, but I couldn't let well enough alone, I had to check an additional box on what areas to clean. Now "clean" in computer talk really means "delete, remove, kill and send somewhere never to be seen again". I know that. I really know that. But I was having a great day and it didn't cross my mind that anything could go wrong.

So I hit the "clean" button. It said it had "freed up" 300 megabytes of space on my computer. ("freed up" has a similar definition to "obliterate")

Hey, my computer was now troubleshoot, cleaned and freed up, I was ready to go.

On to the internet I went. I checked my e-mail, then on to facebook. Up pops access denied, enter your user name and password, which I did. Then comes the disaster... it says "cookies are missing" that allowed me to access facebook with my user name and password. Now I've been on diets where the cookies were missing and it was sad but necessary. But the kind of cookies they were missing weren't chocolate chip. In Internet language, cookies are like a pass key or credit card that prove who you are. Apparently, I had clicked the button to destroy my identity.

Boy o boy, what had I done. I'd screwed up my computer to the point that it had disowned me. I was a man without a computer. Then the company that I have taken their name in vein more times than I can remember actually came to my rescue (literally).

There is a neat little program called "system restore". It should be called "when you do stupid things, click me". You click it, it asks you "when was the last time your computer ran correctly", you pick a date from a calender, and select run. About 20 minutes later, you have your computer back, running like it did a week ago. So much for Maintenance Saturday. The whole morning is gone, Aletha is back from her job, and all is good with the world once again.