Chernobyl

Near-complete technological melt-down.

My last office finally woke up to the fact that I am no longer at their beck and call, that I am in fact only an ex officio operative. So I had to turn in my gun and badge.
(Guitars and a honky-tonk piano go berserk on the soundtrack as Dirty Al strides into the precinct, face lined and gaunt, reaches into his pocket and pulls out a dull metal star, then draws his .44 Smith & Wesson Magnum from under his arm, cracks open the cylinder to shower slugs on a worn and scarred desk, flips the cylinder shut with a flick of the wrist and throws it on the desk whence it skids into a corner .. CUT, yells the man in the baseball cap, we need to shoot this again with Clint, WHO let Danny de Vito onto the set?!)

Okay, they never gave me a gun or badge. I turned in my laptop.

My trusty steed, my lance and shield all in one. A dull black square-edged IBM Thinkpad that was so over-used, the keys had gone bald. (I need to read up on conditioning and habit - I'm only a sight-typist and yet I could cruise at 70 wpm on a key-board where most of the letters were worn away. Hmmm.) I'd lugged that damn box all over the country and hated its weight, yet when I had to return it I felt a distinct wrench.

Partly because my present office used to be run by A Moron who had No Idea about Laptops. I'm saddled with a Thing that weighs just a little less than the Reserve Bank Building, boots in about the time it takes George Bush to Get an Idea and does NOT connect to the Net under Any Circumstances.

AND ... the Net connection on my home PC is kaput, my office PC has to be re-formatted about thrice a day, I'm reduced to carrying my essential files around on a pen drive and I feel like Robert Redford (orl ROIGHT, so it wuz Peter Finch!) in Network where he goes to the window and yells I CAN'T TAKE IT ANY MORE!

Excuse me while I have a nervous breakdown. Normal service will be resumed soon. Like some time before 2009 ....