Roosey Roads, PR
18.14.009N
65.37.581W

I’m sure you can tell by now that I love my computer. It’s a complex toy that I enjoy playing with. When it works. When it doesn’t work and I know that it’s operator error, it can be the most frustrating piece of hardware on earth.

For example, when we received an e-mail from our insurance company indicating that they wanted a recent survey on our boat before renewing our policy, it should have been a simple act of scanning a copy of the one we had done last fall (thank God and Jim Campbell) and e-mailing it back to them. Except that when I connected my new HP laptop to my old HP printer, the computer wouldn’t recognize that I had connected it. What a pain in the patoot!

Since we hadn’t brought along the CD containing the printer drivers that came with the old printer, we had to pack both the laptop and the printer into backpacks and schlep them into the bowling alley to connect both of them to the internet to download the software. Even that was more problematic than it should have been. The long (an hour for the download) and the short (Dale’s temper by the time we were completely done) of it, is that once the laptop and printer were happily clicking in the same direction, I was able to scan the document and forward it on to our insurance company (another hour of uploading the information). The things we do to keep that particular industry happy.

With the morning completely gone, we started our trek back to the boat. Along the way, the base CO spotted us and flagged us down to tell us that the package we had been waiting for was in his office. It had been mis-delivered (since it was clearly addressed to the marina) a few days before.

We quickly went through it and found 3 of our 5 Florida registration renewals; one of them was for the Palace, so I’ll be heading back to the bowling alley for one more connection before we leave. As I started out, when my computer and I are working as a cohesive unit, you can hardly tell that we’re out of the country. However, when there is a break in communication between my computer and its operator, I can tell that we are in the farthest reaches of the world without Cherie and the IT crew to back me up.