Death of Hardware (work-related)
When I came into work yesterday morning, the screen of my workstation was a most unappealing shade of red. I wiggled the video cable, and the colors went back to normal. When I came into work today, the screen of my workstation was, again, a most unappealing shade of red, but this time wiggling the video cable was not enough. After a few hours of this, I sent email to the local den of BOFHs and switched to a different machine.
Oh, yeah, my corporate masters don't use roaming profiles. So even though I'm logging into their stupid windows domain, have to deal with their windows remote management programs poking away at the PC and ensuring the I don't have permissions to add new programs, and being saddled with not having root passwords, my user configuration is not stored away on a fileserver so that it will follow me from box to box.
So all of my settings, ssh private keys, and private programs (stored nicely in my own windows profile directories) just aren't there anymore.
But on the bright side, this means no Office XP 2003 Pro™, which means no pesky meeting requests popping up on the screen 4 weeks after the meeting was over (I don't use **tl**k unless I have to open some w*rd document a manager sends me [when they care enough to say "hi!" in 4mb or more], so when I do use it, I get this huge wad of old meeting notices), and no way of new viruses creeping into the w*rd documents I end up having to read, and, even better, I've got an excuse for not reading those documents, at least until the den of BOFH's get back to me sometime early in 2005.