It was Outlook's fault ...

by Mark Gibbs

May 14, 2001 —

Two Fridays ago a colleague said, "See you at the meeting Monday."

"What meeting?" I replied.

He cracked up, "Thank God I'm not the only one with Alzheimer's -- you accepted the Outlook meeting request." "I did?" "You did . . . yesterday." This was the first event that led to the worst day I've had this year.

As soon as I got a chance, I checked out how this faux pas could have occurred. Ah-ha! Outlook was set to automatically accept meeting requests, but it doesn't warn you when it does. Another Outlook feature revealed.

So now I was committed to a meeting on the morning I was to drive from my home (north of Los Angeles) to Las Vegas for the spring NetWorld+Interop 2001 (roughly a five-hour road trip). This meant I'd have to drive to our office Monday morning, attend the meeting and then leave for Las Vegas at, at best, 1 p.m. Not bad, but not what I'd planned.

Later that Friday my wife called me from home and said, "Why doesn't the printer work?" When I got home, I checked the printer and assumed it needed new ink cartridges. Since I wouldn't have a chance to get new cartridges over the weekend, I figured I'd print out my route map to Vegas at the Monday morning meeting.

Monday morning came and I found I couldn't get access to a printer at the office, so what to do? I realized I had forgotten my cufflinks so I thought, "Why not go home, pick up ink cartridges on the way and then print my maps at home. I could then grab my cufflinks and head out for Vegas."

I stopped at CompUSA to get new ink cartridges and a power adapter so I could use my PC with my new Garmin eMap GPS to navigate as I drove.

But when I changed the cartridges, the printer still didn't work. I downloaded and installed the diagnostics that I hadn't installed when I set up the server originally. Ah-ha! The problem was a print head had died. But the diagnostics didn't tell me which one.

Now what? Well, why not just rely on the computer instead of printing out maps? I had De Lorme's Road Warrior Edition of Street Atlas. With GPS support this product can announce the turns in a route by voice synthesis as well as respond to spoken commands (Me: "Where am I?" Computer: "Lost."). This would be cool. (Note that by now, it was 3 o'clock, and I'd planned to leave at 1. My plans were not looking good.)

So I plugged an adapter into the car and discovered it didn't come with the correct plug for my laptop. But I had some other adapters, and I finally found one that fit.

I carefully set the polarity (the adapter instructions warned about getting the polarity wrong) and plugged in the laptop. It immediately froze. Oh no. The polarity must be wrong. I powered the computer down, reversed the polarity, plugged it in and restarted the machine.

Instantly there was the smell of fried electronics. The laptop was dead. I have no idea why the machine froze the first time, but the polarity -- until I changed it -- had, in fact, been right. Aghhhhh!

This was a disaster. Of course I didn't have a current backup and my life was on that machine. OK, hang tough (as opposed to breaking into uncontrolled sobbing). I drove back to CompUSA (they are the nearest repair service I have), checked the dead machine in and went to buy print heads.

Of course, they had three of the four heads required. I tried a couple of other shops without any joy and returned home hoping that I'd strike lucky with the three new heads. This was my first break -- the printer worked!

I printed out route maps from another machine using MapBlast and finally left just before 7 p.m.

I arrived in Las Vegas around midnight with my old Sony C1 laptop to write this, but without my schedule, telephone list or e-mail system. What a week, and it was only just edging into Tuesday.

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