Xircom Travel Bug

This TB has been muggled from the cache... sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Retrieved from Greater Lafayette Pizza Party and I readily recognized it. (A little unfair though, Mr. Schmeni works for HP! Of course I'd know what this was! We still have a laptop in the house that uses one!)

My high-tech horror story?! Oh gee! So many to choose from.

When the mini Schmenis were small, I worked part time in an office and part time from my home. The mini Schmenis were watching Bill Nye Science Guy while I finished up my billings for work. I had spent the last hour cranking out a good number of invoices. Bill Nye was explaining how electricity worked. He got towards the end of the program (and I was towards the end of my billings) and this "zzzzt" sound happened and our electricity went off.

Of course, I lost the hour's worth of billings.

Do I think that Bill Nye is so powerful to kill my power? Not always. But sometimes, I do wonder!

Discovered while on an Indiana Spirit Quest Fun Run with a fun bunch of women from Indianapolis.

My most interesting high tech horror story was back in the dark ages of computers, 1989. I was in Santa Rosa, CA about an hour north of San Francisco. I was working my way through college as a bookkeeper for a construction company and it's various entities. I was simultaneously posting invoices on two different computers (pre-networking). I was listening on the radio to the pre-game hype before the World Series, when the ground and building started to rumble and shake. We knew this was a big quake because most little rumblers are over before you realize what's going on, but this one was big and kept going about 15 to 20 seconds. The secretary and I ran for the doorways to the executive offices and braced ourselves there, the other bookkeeper and the office manager did what you weren't supposed to do, ran through the entire building screaming and out the door into the parking lot. We were far enough away from the epicenter of the Loma Prieta quake that there wasn't much damage to buildings just an enormous power outage for several hours, and I had backed up fairly recently on one of the computers (remember the big floppy disks, 5 3/4??), but since I was in the middle of posting on the second one I lost an entire afternoon of data entry on it. Oh, well, they didn't play the World Series game that night either.