21 September 2011
Yesterday, at 10.00 a,,m, sharp there was a knock on the door. It was Ollie who had come, with his ambulance, to take me to the golf club. Last week he told me quite clearly that he was very sorry but he could not take me this week as his ambulance was going in to be sprayed. I had quite reconciled myself to missing this day out but obviously something changed in Ollie’s plans but he had not bothered to inform me. Although he offered to wait while I changed I would have been too late to catch up with the first group finishing their first nine and therefore considered it not worth the effort of changing and rushing to the club to try to catch up with my friends.
My troubles continue with my laptop. Indeed, they appear to be getting worse. Yesterday ,in the middle of editing my blog, I lost 21 pages. They simply disappeared off the screen. I am thoroughly familiar with the method of recovering documents but no matter what I did I could not locate the 21 missing pages. In the end I decided that I would let the MND Association’s contracted technicians, Microlink, sort it out for me. I rang them and on the promise that they would ring back shortly spent most of the day avoiding using my telephone but no call came from them. I rang again this morning and was palmed off with the same message. They will ring me back. That was an hour or so ago so we will see if they are true to their word this time.. (They did eventually ring back six hours later only to confirm my worst fears that these pages have been permanently deleted. Fortunately I can copy the missing pages from the blog itself and paste them back into the blog diary-what a bore)
Apart from the loss of my 21 pages, other things seem to be happening to my laptop. The default pages of word have changed, as indeed have they in my Blog. This means I have to go via a different route to get to various menus. If I didn’t know better I would think that I had a virus on my computer. On my own computer I always ran Norton Antivirus but when the MND Association loaned me this particular laptop they had their own anti-virus programme installed. I just hope it’s working!
Still no response from the MND ‘s support team over my Dragon problems. As it is now over four months since we started dealing with this particular issue and I have had to spend 14 or 15 hours on the telephone with them to-date, I have come to the end of my patience and informed them that unless we resolve something by the end of this week I shall contact the CEO or trustees of the MND Association and suggest that we seek help from more competent technicians. I don’t suppose for one minute that this threat will worry them at all but it will at least make the MND Association aware that, for whatever reason, they are simply not providing the service that we need which is even for important for disabled people than for those who are able-bodied .
We have a saying in this country, It never rains but it pours. Compounding the problems I am already having with my laptop, today the Live box internet connection failed. I rang the Orange broadband technicians to talk me through reconnection but ,of course, could not carry out their instructions myself so I roped it in’ Jane the sheep’ who was babysitting at the time. Paul Jane could have tortured herself on plugging power leads and holding switches down until the gentleman at the other end of the telephone-who was I suspect speaking from Bangalore!-said we could go no further until we connected the Live box with a special red cable which he would send to me in 2 or 3 working days. I knew this to be nonsense as only a couple of weeks ago I had the same problem and managed to restore the wireless connection without any cable, but there was no arguing with this gentleman. After I hung up I rang Paul, who was just around the corner and his brother’s works, and he kindly popped round and quickly sorted it out for me.
After all these problems I felt exhausted, just like this little fellow. Click here
