If a colleague hadn't given me a small container of key lime yogurt yesterday, I probably would have dissolved in a sniveling lump on the floor of my campus office. Sometimes a small gesture can help us endure a big disaster.
At first I thought it was a small disaster. After a week of long and exhausting meetings, I hadn't intended to go to campus at all on Friday, preferring to stay home and do a smattering of work on my college-owned laptop computer. I needed to write a draft of an important document and circulate it among committee members, and I was working against a tight deadline--but when I turned on the laptop Friday morning, I saw the dreaded blue screen of death.
So I used my phone to alert our IT help desk and I headed for campus. By the time I arrived, I'd received a message Windows users all over the world would recognize: Crowdstrike had struck and all our campus computers were collateral damage.
The IT crowd promised to work its way around campus fixing one computer after the other and they very kindly thanked me for my patience, which was generous. I promise that I tried to be patient, but I had a deadline. IT arrived in my office around 9:30 a.m. "It's a simple fix," they said, but in my case that wasn't true. They had to take the laptop back to the IT office and left me another laptop to use while I waited.
And waited.
And waited.
I got some work done, true, but by noonish I was feeling peckish and cranky. I hadn't planned to be on campus so long so I hadn't packed a lunch, and I didn't want to leave my office lest the IT crowd returned with my laptop. I was scavenging in the English Department fridge and found a jug of lemonade left over from some departmental event. Lemonade for lunch! Better than nothing, I suppose.
Then a colleague came in and offered to share her key lime yogurt. Score!
Key lime yogurt has gotten me through tough times before. Fifteen years ago when chemotherapy destroyed my tastebuds, key lime yogurt was one of the few food items that didn't taste like glue. And so I accepted my colleague's gift as a lifeline.
Key lime yogurt couldn't solve the problems Crowdstrike caused to airlines, hospitals, or even my campus IT crowd, who returned my computer soon after lunch and moved on to repair many more, but it got me through a tough moment and helped me do my job.
"Your computer is a little screwy," the IT guys said, but this was no surprise to me--for months it's been groaning as if it's giving birth to baby computers. My computer caused a whole host of IT guys to try one thing after another and scratch their heads when nothing helped, until finally something did help and now my laptop is working without groaning. Score!
This would be a good time to finally buy myself a home computer, but I'd planned to do that after I get my car paid off, which should happen next week, barring catastrophes. My usual poor timing means that I was crippled by the Crowdstrike strike, but fortunately I could count on a hard-working IT crowd to come to my rescue.
And let's not forget the colleague carrying key lime yogurt. If we all pull together, we can get through just about anything.
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