Which way did he go?

With it being Christmas time and all I have been expecting to be visited by Santa and his elves and not the nasty little gremlin that popped in for an unexpected visit yesterday morning. Have you ever invited a friend over to spend the day and eagerly anticipated their arrival and had all sorts of fun things to go do with them? Well, yesterday morning I woke up and found out that my invisible friend had arrived and started wreaking havoc early.
The first evil task that this gremlin did was to mess up my main Gateway system. I sat down with my first cup of java of the day and was greeted by multiple IO errors in most of the applications that tried to run. At first I thought the ram upgrade I had installed a week ago was suspect. I rebooted the system with my trusty PC Check diskette and ran some quick diagnostics on the hardware. The only thing that failed was the SMART functionality on the main hard drive. That could be indicative of the main hard drive going bad. So, off to work I went with my baby in tow in hopes I could troubleshoot its woes in between trouble tickets.
No sooner had I gotten to work I noticed that my gremlin friend had his dirty little claws in the work network. One of the servers needed to be rebooted so that an application called Cribmaster would work again. I had no sooner fixed that problem when one of the engineers came to get me with laptop problems. Once all that was done and the backup tapes were swapped on the server I spent some time on the phone with Gateway tech support convincing them that I was not a stupid end user that did not have a clue. Why is it that tech support people just assume everyone is a blithering idiot when it comes to computers and how to use them? I had to convince them beyond the perponderance of evidence that I indeed had anti virus software running and current and that I had defragged the hard drive and there was no spyware, adware, malware or viruses on my system. I assured them that all that was ailing my baby was an uninvited gremlin that was causing me major headaches today.
With all of that said and done I took advantage of the 53 days left on my parts and service warranty and shipped the system off to Dallas Texas. I was assured I would see my computer again sometime in early January depending on how many systems greeted their tech when it arrived. My gremlin was bored with me at this point and decided to race home ahead of me. When I got home, after shipping the pc I had no sooner gotten settled when Justin announces that he could not get on the Internet with his computer and asked me if my removing the gateway in some way disabled the high speed dsl connection. I told him that it had not and that I would look at it. While I am running ipconfig on his pc Katy comes in the front door and asks me if I would come outside. I thought that was sort of weird but I went outside anyway. Once I get there I am greeted by this 19 year old lady who is our next door neighbor who has accidentally spilled hot liquid down her front and she is 38 weeks pregnant to boot.
I told Katy to help the lady to our couch and I called 911 and had them send out an ambulance. Comes to find out the poor neighbor had second degree burns. The ambulance carted her off to Trident hospital in Summerville and that freed me up to fight the Network gremlins in my house. Once I rebooted the dsl modem and logged it back on to the network and turned on bridging again I was able to connect the kids pc to the Internet via the Motorola wireless router/switch/firewall. Please say a prayer for our neighbor Amanda that she will be ok and not in too much pain.
Once all of that was taken care of I had about 10 min for a power nap and then off to Folly Beach to work security at my favorite fuel depot and watch all the crack heads and drunks buying gas, munchies, beer and smokes. Hey, atleast I get paid to watch the entertainment four hours a night. LOL...
Today, I hope that my life is gremlin free. Maybe he will come visit you??
Merry Christmas...