My laptop computer has been brought to the Apple people at Flaminia Computer to be fixed, but it is really not working right at all. It overheats quickly even with a chill pad, and the batter drains within 10 minutes of being unplugged. If I am on the internet it likes to crash the machine and I've been blocked in the middle of my powerpoint presentations too by a sudden, no-reason, shutdown of the whole machine.
So I went and purchased a computer for my working - a desktop, iMac - again from Flaminia Computer. The Theology Faculty here promised to pay, but there were all sorts of delays (which I will explain in a moment), so I used my credit card.
Flaminia Computer advertising WiFiThe total of the computer, with the three year guarantee and taxes, came to (gulp) € 1,611.00. The faculty (school of theology) assured me that they would reimburse me by check so that I could send this to you. However, things have developed differently. For one thing, since September, there have been the deaths of two brothers who worked in the financial offices of the UPS. Three days after I got here, the head financial administrator of the UPS was rushed to hospital; after 2 weeks there, he came home and was well for a couple of days… and hten fell ill again. He is now in his native Poland for the last two weeks undergoing testing…
This would be a sad report of curiosities for you do not know these people. However, the impact is this: the new person working the finances at UPS does not have signature on all the accounts.
So, the long and the short of this is that the Faculty could not secure a check from the UPS, nor could they do a wire transfer. But yesterday the prefect of the Theology Dept came to me in my office and gave me € 1,611 in cash.
The final piece of bad news is that my laptop is still not functioning. As I said, it is crashing now all the time, which is not good for a Macintosh. I am trying to stabilize it, and hope to succeed, but I am also recuperating all my preferences and other data at this time (when I am free to do t his because my class schedule is 8 hours of class in the first three days of the week). When I return to Berkeley, I will need to get me a good desktop mac - because (already the technicians at Cal's computer place told me this :) I am using the laptop more than what it was designed for. A laptop is for travel an occasions that call for brief work, not 9 hours a day of work. It is the third time this computer has broken down, and I burned through two other laptops in the five years previous to buying this one.
So, it is not in my budget, but this is one of those necessities. I need to get a desktop computer when I get back to teach the second semester and carry on all the assignments that province, house and faculty put on me.
Whoa, that wasn’t so hard to say, now, was it?
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