Early Riser

My jet lag did a headstand today: whereas I slept at 5 am the day before, I woke up at 5 am today. For the first time in my life I experienced the lifestyle of the early riser - made breakfast, watched the news, spent time choosing what to wear - as opposed to my usual late-riser routine - skip breakfast, wear whatever happens to be ironed, and put on shoes while trying to call a taxi.

Since I'm ideologically opposed to early rising, I shall have to do my best to not enjoy the insidious benefits of early rising, and get my body back to a late-to-bed, late-to-rise schedule as soon as possible.

In other news, we would like to officially welcome Tym to the ranks of us Mac users - another person rescued from the Dark Side! I have just spent the past 3 hours at work loading 3 files onto 5 laptops - a process which would have taken minutes had they been Macs, but which took 3 hours because they were running Windows 98. A typical procedure involved:

• switching on the laptop, and enduring 5 minutes of This Laptop Wasn't Shut Down Properly The Last Time, and waiting for the computer to do the equivalent of groping in the dark to find its balls
• trying to get the computer to recognise its own external floppy drive
• trying to read the A: drive. This took 5 minutes - you'd click on it, and after a delay of almost 30 seconds, the window would open. Grrr.
• copying 3 files to the desktop
• trying to shut down the computer, and realising that after 5 minutes, it was still stuck in Shutting Down, thus losing patience, and hitting the power button. Which explains step one above to some degree.

To be fair, I was skipping between this and real work throughout, but even had I sat there and dedicated my time to this (which I'm glad I didn't, since it would have involved 4 parts pointless waiting to 1 part screaming at the computer) it would have taken me 15 minutes per computer at least, for a total of 1 hour and 15 minutes of life wasted.