I am feeling quite pleased with myself.

Chuffed, so I am.

You see, yesterday I managed to do something quite difficult. I managed to take a brand new laptop with two operating systems on it and brick it.

Operating systems these days are pretty much idiot proof. It takes quite a drop of expertise to thoroughly and totally fuck up the system beyond all repair. Or FUBAR, if you like. But I managed it. Totally fucked. I switch on the laptop and all I get is a message along the lines of “error: command not found” whereupon it reboots itself and comes up with the same message and goes into an endless loop.

I hit the old F12 thing and meddled around with various analytical stuff and each test said my laptop was fine. I was delighted for it, but it still didn’t work. My problem now was all the important shit on the hard drive, such as the two carefully crafted pages of The Book that took me weeks to write.

So I stuck in a Linux USB thing and retrieved everything important and stuck it on a portable slab.

I went back to playing with the F12 toy. There’s a ton of options in there but I finally found a “Restore to factory settings” option. I hit that one this morning. It gave grave warnings of doom, that everything I had ever done would be consigned to a black hole and implied that I was effectively to be reborn anew. I went ahead anyway.

I sat back, sipped my mug of tea and tried to fix my lighter which broke last night [haven’t I been having a fun time?]. The laptop displayed its progress with a little percentage thing. The latter wasn’t just your normal 20% type one – it went to two decimal places so it would display 42.65% and about ten minutes later it would display 42.67%.

To cut an enormously story short, it completed. I then had my re-introduction to Cortana who started yelling at me. For those of you who have never had the pleasure, Cortana is an intensely irritating female American computer voice that cheerily greets you and demands that you talk back. Fuck that. It switched that off and carried on setting up Windows.

Eventually I was back to square one in Windows. All I have to do is install my necessary software and replace The Book. I decided to leave that for the moment and reboot to see what would happen. Well, fuck me but there was the old boot options menu. For the first time ever, Windows hadn’t fucked it up. A bleedin’ miracle!

I booted into Linux and here I am. Nothing lost. No formatted disks or any of that crap. I’m back in the game.

And I fixed my lighter too.

But I’m still very proud of my computer skills that I could breach every failsafe measure and brick a laptop.

That takes some real skill these days.