Did you get the feeling that I was a little frustrated yesterday? Did that come across? I kind of gave in to the feeling that the world was against me. I let myself fall in a hole every so often, maybe just to give myself the chance to climb up out of it. Things are never as black as I paint them on my dark days, but I'm not afraid to let everyone think they are. Am I?

Once I got to the point where I knew I was going to have to spend some of the Boss's money, I started seeing the light of a new dawn. (Okay, that's probably enough of that metaphor.) At first I thought I'd just get a new CD-ROM drive, and that would be that. Then I thought, why not upgrade to a DVD-ROM drive instead? Well, why not indeed?

Eric dropped by this afternoon, to my great relief. I always feel better about my own problems if I can dump them on somebody else — especially if it's someone who knows what he's talking about. He messed up my mind today, though. By the time he left he had me considering buying another computer (on the Boss's money, of course, as I probably don't even need to add).

First he tried to diagnose the problem, and eventually he came to the same conclusion I did. Bad drive. Throw it away and get a new one. So we looked at some on a couple of retail sites, and before I knew it I was thinking about buying two drives, a DVD and a CD-RW. Well, why not? The two together would cost me (i.e., the Boss) less than I originally thought I'd have to pay for one (especially if Eric can install it for me).

Since Eric is a former network administrator (for a formerly large, formerly successful software company, and aren't they all?), he came up with the idea of buying (with the Boss's money) a new computer and linking it with the old one. That way I'd have the old hard drive (which is about two-thirds full) and the Zip drive, plus a whole lot of programs I rarely use, all available at the flip of a switch. He made it sound so easy, cheap and exciting that he should have been in sales.

We did some shopping around online, and if it had been my money I probably would have spent it then and there. Now I don't know what I'm going to do. It was a lot easier when I thought I only had one choice. But I'll talk to the Boss tomorrow and see which way the wind is blowing. He might feel he owes me something. I've been using the same computer for three and a half years, which is almost as long as it's been since my last raise.

MSN is making my decision to go with Pacific Bell DSL seem like a stroke of genius, or at least good luck (which often passes for the same thing). My connection was hit-and-miss all day today, and the email server seemed to be having problems. Even though the MSN site insisted that email was up and running at full efficiency, it took me half an hour to unload eleven messages, ten of which were nasty old spam. I'm sure I'll never have any problems like that, once I get switched over.