Monday, June 19, 2006

Brain Dead Goofy

I've lost half my brain! No, not my real brain...my electronic brain (aka my PDA). For about the last six years, I've used some sort of Personal Digital Assistant. I recently upgraded to the Treo 650.

My Treo 600 finally bit the digital bullet, so I got the 650. Upgrades on these things are always painful, so I was already gritting my teeth and crossing my fingers as I diligently uninstalled my old software, installed the new, and fired up the synch. Would my data come over to the new device? Would it stubbornly refuse to move? Would it vaporize into never-never land? Oh, the suspense...

As it turned out, everything synched perfectly... except for my calendar. One problem: the calendar is the main thing I use on my PDA. Anytime of the day or night, I can whip out my PDA and check my lunch plans, er, I mean my important business meetings.

So I called Sprint. They worked with me a while, then told me to call my company help desk. They worked with me a while, they decided a live person (let's call him Neo) actually needed to come take a look. Neo came and was very optimistic. "We'll get you going in no time!" he said. I had to love his attitude. I should have known better.

So after two days of Neo popping in and out of my life, disrupting my work flow, he finally discovered the problem. "Hey! You've got like six years of calendar on this thing!" (this said like I had been testing him this entire time or something). "You've blown up your account on the Outlook Exchange server. That's why things don't work."

"Er. I'm an information junkie," I admitted. "I need all that info. You never know when someone might ask me for the date of that Hatha Yoga class I took back in 2001. C'MON MAN...I GOTTA HAVE IT!" (this was followed up by much whining and groveling on my part to PLEASE NOT LOSE MY DATA). And so....

I lost my data.

Well, to be truthful, I only kinda lost my data. All six years of goodness are on my desktop computer, at work, not very portable at all. And I now have only a paltry three months of calendar on my PDA. I can almost remember that much stuff...what good is that?