I have a black thumb for computers.

I think I may have destroyed my parents' home computer. I was watching an episode of Glee online (I am so ashamed) earlier today. I touched the computer, which apparently set off some klaxon somewhere in the bowels of the computer tower: WARNING WARNING SELF-DESTRUCT IMMINENT. Tiny computer lemmings grabbed their children and most prized possessions and fled for the hills.

First the monitor froze. There was sound, but the screen was frozen on an awkward in-the-middle-of-singing-and-overemoting face. All of my frantic mouse-jiggling and key-tapping produced no change in the picture on the screen. I tried doing the control-alt-delete thingy to no avail. Since it was time for me to go to work, the only thing I could do was turn it off and come back to it later.

After several hours, I walked back in the door to find my dad sitting in front of the computer. It would no longer turn on, and none of the "F" keys were doing doodly. There was some swearing and googling of terms, but nothing seemed to work. I spent an hour and a half on the phone with Dell tech support; the final conclusion is that the computer has to be totally reset. That means that all of the files on the computer will be wiped out and all software that was installed after setup will be gone. Not so good when your mom has important things like endocrinology talks, her CV, and photos from her recent trip to Peru on there. So tomorrow I will be taking the computer tower to Best Buy and paying a ridiculous amount of money to have them recover all of the files on the hard drive. I've been assured that its not my fault and that they were thinking about replacing the computer soon anyway. Well, even if it isn't, I still feel like it is, and I'm a responsible person, dammit. It's probably a good thing that I'm scheduled for a ridiculous amount of hours next week.

And this is not my first victim. I killed a Dell laptop a few years ago; I still have no idea what I did, but a chunk of the operating system mysteriously vanished. I blame Vista because I think it's awful, but when I'm being honest with myself I know that I most likely had a hand in that crash.

Strong Bad understands my computer woes, though mine are admittedly less amusing:







In other news, I retain my amazing ability to attract awkward, nerdy guys. Not the cute, endearing awkward type of nerd, the creepy nerd who collects your hair and chewed bubblegum and builds a shrine to you in his closet.

The latest is one of the guys who works in the book store with me. He stares at me awkwardly, and pays me compliments like, "you look cool today," and "your hair looks cool." One: not interested. Two: get a thesaurus.