#103 Frustration

Eric had more computer problems than anyone I’ve ever known. Despite being an early adopter and knowing more about computers than most people I know, his was always the one that crashed and died. I think he had about 4 or 5 hard drives crash on him. I’m not exaggerating.

This morning I got an email that my outlook email was too full and I would have to delete some messages in order to keep getting messages. As I have mentioned in a previous post, I keep my inbox relatively clean so I was kind of surprised, until I realized I had over 5,000 deleted emails that the program had saved. When I delete emails, I assume they are deleted, but I guess that is wrong. They are just moved to the “deleted” file and I have to delete them from there if I really want them gone. Does this seem redundant to anyone else?? I tried to select all and delete, but apparently outlook can only delete up to 4,000 messages. So I resigned myself to deleting about 1,500 by hand until I reached that 4,000 threshold. I found the control button and selected each email on the page and then deleted them together. Until this somehow started copying the emails. So instead of one email, I had two or four of the same one in the deleted file. This was not making progress. So I painstakingly deleted about 1,500 emails, one by one, ignoring the growing headache and incredulity that there was not a better way. I breathed a sigh of relief when I got to 4,000 and once again tried to select all and delete. Only it didn’t work. I deleted a few more so I was officially under the magic number and tried it again. It didn’t work again. Can you believe I didn’t scream? I did curse, but no one else was in the room.

All of this got me thinking about Eric and his computer issues. Once when he was a law student at UVA he drove to the DC area to get his computer fixed. I seem to remember it didn’t work the first time so he had to do it twice. Why is everything with computers so hard?

At times like this I miss Eric’s humor. He would have me laughing and though I would still be frustrated, somehow it wouldn’t be so bad. And maybe, just maybe, he would know a better way.