So I’m sitting here, happily surfing away, when all of a sudden, my poor baby computer is the victim of a vicious, thoughtless attack. You see, in my apartment building, the breaker switches for each floor are located in the hallways. Apparently, my neighbour needed to turn the power off and reset HIS breaker, so I guess he thought if turning his off and on was good, turning all mine off and on would be even better. So, I go out to the hallway to see what the heck is going on, and find him red handed in the switch box.
“Oh, is your power back on?” he asks.
“Yeah, it’s on again, but you took my computer down hard,” I say.
“But your power is on, right?”
“Yes, but that’s not the point. You just powered off my computer while I was in the middle of using it. I would have lost everything I was working on.”
“But your power’s on again, isn’t it?” :rolleyes:
Sheesh. Are there still people so computer illiterate in the world that they don’t understand that cutting the power to a working computer is a bad thing? Thank god for my surge protector. All I need now is a reliable UPS, and my baby will be protected from the idiots of the world.
(And to add insult to injury, I have to sit through Microsoft’s finger-shaking error message when I power on again - “You know, if you would just make a little effort and shut your PC down properly, we wouldn’t have to go through all this bother of checking your disks. The things I do for you ingrates…”)
Yeah, no kidding. You have no way of knowing what’s going on in someone else’s apartment. Just randomly turning off breakers isn’t going to endear you to anybody.
hey featherlou, if you buy yourself one of those battery backup surge protectors, you can protect yourself from idiotic neighbors and other acts of god. i have one; it gives you at least ten minutes with the power off so you can save and shut down safely. they goe em at comp usa for about 70 bucks.
Smeel, this may or may not apply to you, but I was having that problem with my computer when I bought it. I switched browsers and use Netscape exclusively now, and the problem cleared right up. Just a thought. essvee, that’s a great idea. It sounds kinda stupid, but it never occurred to me before that someone else would switch my power off on me.