Sample Instructions
Ron Graham
- Purchase new hard drive (NHD). Get excited about
$50 mail-in rebate.
- Back up old hard drive (OHD) onto seven Zip disks.
Find out that's not enough.
- Replace OHD with NHD. Discover you don't need
mounting brackets and most of the screws.
- Follow NHD installation procedure. Find you need
DOS-bootable floppy to install NHD. Find you don't
have one. Call five friends trying to find one.
Fail. Most of your friends don't know what one is.
- Replace NHD with OHD. Miss "The Lone Gunmen."
- Search America Online (AOL) for half an hour for a
shareware utility that creates a DOS-bootable floppy.
- Download and install the shareware.
- Replace OHD with NHD.
- Follow NHD installation procedure. Find that NHD
gets "partitioned" into four "devices." Otherwise,
Windows can't work on NHD. Find out that these devices
are called C, D, E, and F. Recall that heretofore
your CD-ROM was "D" and your Zip drive was "E."
Recognize that now both of these devices will have to
be reinstalled. Wonder why you didn't think of that.
- Find your CD-ROM installation disk is gone, even
though you installed a new CD-ROM about a month ago.
Ask your significant other (SO) if SO has the foggiest
notion as to where that precious disk might be, while
knowing the answer. SO claims not to want to be
in the same house when you're "repairing the PC," even
if it means missing "The Lone Gunmen."
- Replace NHD with OHD.
- Log on to AOL again, trying to find CD-ROM driver.
Find out AOL's Web server is down.
- Try logging on to the Internet through the College of
New Jersey (TCNJ) server. Find out all the lines are
busy. Vow to flunk your students if they don't get
the #&*$! offline and go to bed. Miss tucking your
own kids in and reading them an excerpt from "Harry
Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban."
- Continue trying TCNJ over and over for about half an
hour until the connection is made. Finally. Go to
Memorex Web site (http://www.memorex.com/) to find
driver. Inexplicably recall Ella Fitzgerald-broken
wine glass commercials.
- Try to download driver to 3.5" floppy. Find out floppy
drive was disconnected when OHD was last reinstalled.
- Power down OHD.
- Cry.
- Drink beer.
- Cry in beer.
- Reconnect 3.5" floppy drive.
- Boot up OHD again.
- Log on at TCNJ again.
- Go to memorex.com again.
- Find the driver again.
- Download it this time.
- Replace OHD with NHD. Remember you STILL have to get
CD-ROM drive back before you can hope to get much of
anything else.
- Try to install CD-ROM driver. Find you need a blank
formatted floppy disk. Find you can't create one.
Find you don't have DOS-executable program FORMAT.COM.
Try to take a formatted floppy and delete all the files
on it. This takes half an hour. CD-ROM driver
installation still fails. "Bad disk."
- Cry again. Quietly this time; family is now asleep.
- Replace NHD with OHD. Try to find old CD-ROM driver
on OHD. Format four or five floppies on the way.
Never mind that they're not blank. Who cares what's
on 'em now?
- Attempt to reload downloaded CD-ROM driver onto some
of the floppies. Ruin two floppies before finding
that downloaded CD-ROM driver is for shit. Kick
yourself, again, for losing CD-ROM installation disk.
- Go back to memorex.com and download driver again.
- Try to reload files onto floppy again. Success!
Finally! Four hours have elapsed by now.
- Print out README.TXT for CD-ROM driver.
- Find out from README.TXT that you need some actual
DOS and Windows system commands just to install driver
on NHD.
- Guess what? You have no Windows disks, and you have
no DOS disks. And you probably couldn't use 'em if
you did, because they were on CD anyway.
- Give up. Decide to go to "Best Buy" tomorrow and BUY
Windows, DOS, and maybe even a whole new computer.
Anything you MIGHT need to finish the job.
- Write this instruction for posterity. Maybe it'll
make you feel better, oh, two years or so later.
(Two years ago I was watching "Dilbert," not "The
Lone Gunmen.")
- Cry yourself to sleep.