Got in this morning and got one of those stupid "network update" notices on my computer as soon as I logged in. I friggin' hate PC's and that's one of the reasons- Big Brother Microsoft constantly bugging you about things you don't really need. Usually I just ignore it, but this time, for whatever reason (lack of coffee? The rain? Being upset that John Kerry had the audacity to refer to Dick Cheney's gay daughter as gay?), I clicked on it. Yeah, I know. In truth, the real reason why I clicked on it is because for some stupid reason I thought if I clicked on it just this once, I wouldn't get bugged for the next couple of weeks.

Two minutes later, right in the middle of something, the computer shut down and restarted. Except it didn't really restart, it just kind of stayed in limbo land. I could see all of my icons on the desktop but I couldn't get anything to happen when I clicked on them. I couldn't even shut the computer down. Which meant, once again, calling Sanjay in Bombay. Which didn't really thrill me considering how well my telephone was working (more about that later).

Luckily, Super-Mondo Corporation actually has one or two IT people, all of whom are there mainly to service Macs. So I called one of them and somebody showed up and half an hour later, I had computer. Turns out by getting one of those wonderful updates, it completely junked the network system and threw everything out of whack.

Lesson: Macs rule.

As for the voice-mail, I walked in and actually saw that I had a voice-mail message. So I thought the phone was working. I was wrong. Several people who reached me said they couldn't leave a message, that they just got an error message. I even tried myself and nothing worked. Finally, I called Tech Support and found out that my voice-mail hadn't been turned on. Two and a half days after initially calling them. All of this just so I could my name to show up on other people's caller ID.

Later that day, I got a couple of voice-mail messages so I thought I had voice-mail working. It wasn't. What was happening is that they turned on my old voice-mail, under my old number, but hadn't turned on my new voice-mail with my new number. If somebody called my old number, they wouldn't get me, but they'd get my voice-mail. But if they called me, they could get me, but not my voice-mail.

Good thing they have this high-tech voice-mail system.