It does not happen often to me, but today I had a day that everything that could go wrong indeed went wrong.

It started in the morning. I woke up because I heard the maid walking around the house cleaning stuff. That is strange, because she normally does not arrive before 7:45 when I have gotten up already. A quick look at my watch revealed that it was 8:30… I overslept! That never happens to me, I always get up right away when I hear my alarm and also never miss my alarm. Turns out that I forgot to set my alarm this time.

So I had to hurry, because I booked a taxi to pick me up at 8:45. I just managed, and even had a quick breakfast in these 15 minutes, but then the taxi did not show up. After waiting for about 20 minutes, a phone call to the taxi company learned me that they made a mistake and cancelled the booking.

When I finally arrived in the office and wanted to check my mail I noticed that my computer was extremely slow. I restarted it, and then it did not load the operating system. One more restart worked a little better, and I even got into my mail, but it took me 15 minutes just to restart. So I decided to visit the Apple shop on HuaiHai Lu for a computer check-up.

There they checked my harddisk and virtual memory, but that did not reveal any problems. I told them the computer had been slower for about 10 days already, since they installed OS X Tiger for me. But that could not be the problem they said, and sent me off to an Apple Service Center. After arriving there, they told me that I would need to leave my laptop there for two working days and that they might need to format my harddisk. Oops… I told them that this was not an option for me, so they just ran a one-hour hardware test (for which I had to wait). Also here they found no problems, so they told me to go back to the store again. The service center only does hardware not software, and this must be a software problem. Great, that’s where I just came from. But glad I did not let them keep my computer for two days and format my HD.

The Apple store agreed to reinstall the operating system, but first needed to back-up my data. I had about 80 GB of data on my laptop, and they did not have a harddisk that size left that could be used. This took them 15 minutes to figure out (solution: not backing up the applications that they could reinstall themselves). They told me to come back in 1-2 hours. I asked them for their phone number, because I did not want to come back for nothing.And I was glad I did, because when I called them 3 hours later they told me that backing up was taking so much time that I could not get my laptop back until Friday afternoon….

Back in the office I decided to work through my webmail on another PC. But what do you think? The webmail was not working either. So I decided to forget about work for today (it’s 7:30 PM anyway), write a quick post on my blog and go home for a run in the gym. I hope the treadmill will not suddenly stop working!