I went to my workplace to get a little bit of work done and to set up a computer on the network that would act as a shared drive manager. The getting a little bit of work done part went by quickly, but the setting up a computer on the network didn’t.

I noticed that we had three Dell compact computers in a locked storage room in the back of the office. At first, I decided to try one of these computers – it didn’t really matter how old they were or how bad the processor was, the only thing that was important was that it would connect to the Internet, and that it had plenty of USB ports.

I grabbed the desktop at the top and brought it over to my work area to plug it in to a monitor, mouse, and keyboard to set it up. Oddly, the computer turned on but didn’t send any signal at all to the monitor. I tried restarting it a few times but it still didn’t work. I unplugged the computer and brought it back to the storage room to exchange it with a different computer.

The next computer powered on properly and I could see the Dell loading logo on the monitor, but when it started loading the operating system, the screen went black. Again, I tried restarting it a few times, but it didn’t work. I brought it back to the storage room to exchange it with the last remaining computer, hoping that the third time was a charm.

It wasn’t. The last computer was worst – it powered on but sent nothing to the monitor, and just kept beeping.

At this point I’m obviously frustrated because all three computers aren’t working, and there was obvi­ously no point in keeping these computers if they’re broken but somebody did anyway.

Then, on a side table, I find another Dell desktop. This one isn’t a compact one, but it looked less dusty than the other ones, so I decided to try this one out. Miraculously, it works. Unmiraculously, the Inter­net doesn’t work.

I spent about two hours going back and forth from the Dell computer to my computer trying to find out what the problem could possibly be. I downloaded tons of different drivers trying to find out what the problem was. I even considered reinstalling the operating system, or installing a different version of the operating system.

The I finally figured out what the problem was.

I had to move the ethernet cable to a different port.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 24

Number of times I did my own laundry: 3