Ever had one of those days?

Ever had one of those days where everything you touch just crumbles to dust or goes horribly horribly wrong spiralling out of control?

I am having one of those today – so far I’ve managed to have a small nightmare with my car, a minor catastrophe trying to hang a picture, a torrid time updating the virus software on my desktop and as I started writing this (for the first time) this p.c. went on the blink and I lost everything I had typed.

The day stared fairly well – I had not a lot planned, just some minor checks on the car in preparation for a drive to Belgium to collect my stuff from the apartment (see previous blog).

I checked the oil and water and then I thought, “I wonder if this car has got any way of simply switching over the way the lights dip (from left to right) for the continent?” To check that I found I needed to remove a wide plastic strip that covered the top of the headlights and ran the width of the bonnet covering the area from the radiator to the front of the bonnet opening.

Removing the strip was a ‘doddle’ as it was held in place by 4 plastic bolts that were designed to be undone by hand. I had a shufti and, no, Jaguars aren’t that clever, there is no way of switching over the headlights.

Then the fun started – as I tried to replace the first bolt I somehow managed to drop it down a tiny tiny gap behind the headlight. I checked under the car and was surprised to find there was no sign of the bolt. Then I felt along under the front of the bumper and discovered that the bolt had falled into a tiny sealed ‘chamber’. The floor of the chamber is held in place by two screws, and the back wall, the wheel arch is held in place by another screw.

“No problem, I’ll have that off in a jiffy” I thought optimistically. When I got back with my toolbox I discovered that the front of the car was too low to get the screwdriver at the screws.

In retrospect I now know I should have given up then…

But, instead I got the jack out of the boot and after grazing most of my knuckles in the process (blood everywhere) I jacked up the front of the car and managed to get the screwdriver at the screws…

But the weren’t that kind of screws – they had hexagonal slots in their heads and needed an “alan key”,

“No problem, I’m in this far I’m not giving up now” I thought.

Eventually I found the right sized alan key and then discovered that I couldn’t undo the screws anyway. I tried everything (including a lot of swearing and half a can of WD40). But eventually after an hour of struggling and swearing I had to accept that had managed to burr the heads with the screwdriver and nothing I possessed would get them out and I gave up.

Before I gave up I had made three trips up and down the drive to the garage (on a steep hill and about 50 metres in each direction) and two two sets of stairs to my study to find additional tools to aid me in the futile task. In the process I managed to misplace the alan key twice, got soaked to the skin in a rain storm once and lost all the other bolts once.

When I came to give up the insults kept on coming – I discovered I had somehow managed to break the locking mechanism on one of the other bolts and would turn but not lock.

So that was my car a little worse for wear with a couple of new built in rattles and me hot, wet and bloody…

I then turned my attention to the desktop computer in my study which was complaining that its anti virus software licence was about to expire. I was just about to lash out the £54 required when I remembered that I had recently installed Norton 360 on my laptop and when I had done so I had been told that the licence could cover up to 3 of my personal computers. Great! I visited the Symantec website and sure enough there was the statement in black and white “Buy Norton 360 and protect 3 of your machines”. “So, how do you do that?” I wondered as I had downloaded the software when I installed it on the laptop.

“An easy question, with, no doubt a simple answer” I thought, as I went round and round and round in circles trying to find a way of downloading an additional copy of the f**king software – nothing in the FAQ nothing on any of the pages except that if I bought N360 then I could cover 3 additional machines – but not a dicky bird on how to do it except by lashing out £54.

Eventually I decided to download a trialware copy onto the desktop – but that wasn’t so easy as it was a two step process that required me to get an email from Symantec – to the account I use on my laptop – so I had to configure the desktop to use my laptop email account to get the relevant email. When I got the email I downloaded the very big .exe and started the process it said it had to reboot the p.c. to uninstall the old antivirus software. When it restarted another installation window for some Kodak software mysteriously appeared – I got rid of that and the N360 install window then opened and griped that I was installing something else and it was aborting…

So I rebooted and…
nothing happened…

So I tried to manually find the download and restart it – but the p.c. denied all knowledge of it so I had to download it again… (I hate Bill Gates).

Eventually I after downloading the installation software again (to the desktop this time) I managed to installed it and sure enough there is an option to enter a software key – and that worked – why they couldn’t say that on the Symantec website I just don’t know.

After an uneventful lunch (if you don’t count setting off the car alarm accidentally in a public car park and driving home with the boot open uneventful) I was asked to hang some pictures on the wall in the kitchen. Now I was a little nervous about this given my luck so far – but what could go wrong?

A large hole in the wall where the plaster chipped off – several broken and bent picture hooks, a dent in the wall above the hole where the hammer slipped, a broken drill bit, a wrestling match with two separate electric drills, three trips down the drive to the garage and a lot of swearing… that’s what can go wrong. The walls in the kitchen are a cunning cross between flaky pastry and re-enforced concrete. But I did get the pictures up and so long as you don’t look behind them you would never know…

So I thought I would blog this catalogue of disasters and get it off my chest.

I had been typing for about 5 minutes when the screen on the laptop went blank and an interesting shade of dark green and nothing worked. Eventually after a lot of gentle poking I had to reboot it – and it came back to life, thank goodness…

What else is going to go wrong?

I am now worried as I’ve got a long drive tomorrow including a long stretch on the wrong side of the road!

Gulp!!