Crash Habits

I realized that it has been some while since I wrote here. Nothing eventful has happened between now and my last entry that is really notable except for the fact that I've decided to take a sabbatical from the long-distance running to let my bones and joints heal up properly. I'm substituting in more cycling for fitness. I opted out of the Saskatchewan Marathon this year, as well as the Bridge City Boogie that is scheduled for today. I'm stuck in the midst of the second day of trying to resolve computer problems, and today I took the radical step of doing a total overhaul of my operating system.
My Sunday so far has gone as follows:
Stage 1: Start reinstalling Windows 8.0 operation system, since all my free time yesterday was used in vain and wasted effort desperately using whatever help advice and fixes I tried to deploy.
0% installed . . .
Showering, hygiene and grooming . . .
10% installed . . .
Prepared and had breakfast (scrambled eggs with onions and jalapeños and salsa, hashbrowns and coffee; loaded and turned on dishwasher
25% installed . . .
Go for another walk with dog to kill time between software loading, get rained on, return home quickly. I'm kind of thankful for the rain to make me feel less regretful and having an excuse for being cooped up inside to attend to the configuring . . .
33% installed . . .
Cleaned kitchen and sweep floors . . .
54% installed . . .
Folding laundry, changed bedding, and cleaned/dusted/vacuumed bedroom, groom the pooch . . .
67% installed . . .
Made more coffee, chatted with my Mom for a bit on the phone . . .
89% installed  . . .
Start praying to Jesus, Buddha, and whatever other patron saints and deities there are for restoring system crashes who'd care to listen to my plight. Twelve minutes later, a successful installation occurs. On to Stage 2 of this soul-crushing operation. Ella pokes me with her paw to get my attention, and then jumps up on my lap to try to comfort me from my noticeable unrest from this irritating fiasco.
Stage 2: Begin downloading and installing the layer of Windows 8.0 updates necessary before I can ever tack on the latest Windows 8.1 upgrade (92 needed).
Start a new blog entry on desktop (this one) . . .
0 of 92 downloaded . . .
I unload my dishwasher and started preparing stuff for lunch. I then begin reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by the late Douglas Adams, feeling about as useless, surreal, and absurd as the Electric Monk introduced in chapter 2 of the book through the flow of this process. A half hour has passed by, then I see . . .
0 of 92 downloaded!!! . . . <a myriad of expletives at this point> . . . oh wait, holy crap it finally took some action to install updates. Loading and configuration seems like trying to escape a Black Hole at this point knowing that I'm not even half way finished of what I need to do to correct all this.
I think the point of how aggravating I find post-crash massive scale installations has been made, and this is probably the main reason why I would hate having an IT career as a tech support worker. I couldn't handle dealing with the levels of livid pent-up frustration while talking myself through a task, I'm sure my impatience would only get worse when dealing with someone else. If I were tied to a desk incapable of hastening the process, and couldn't make the busywork, or anything else constructive or productive for things like what I just described to curb this aggravation, I'd be totally at my wits end.
It's my own damn fault that this has happened. A complete refreshing install once a year is what I would recommend for anyone who uses their system at my degree of usage, but I follow my own advice rather poorly. I haven't performed any maintenance like this since I purchased my laptop a few years ago.
Being that we are now so interlinked with technology, this all leads me to wonder if there could be an entirely new psychological profile inventory made solely based on a person's ability to organize, attend, adapt, and using time-passing habits through the tedious process of recovering from a computer system crash and other monotonous first world problems: much like the formal stages of dealing with the news of hearing that one is approaching their mortality in a short given time (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance). It's being affronted by the irony of taking so much lagging time is used to set up things that are supposed to process all the other things in our lives in nanoseconds.
I forgot how long and agonizing this process is, and if I were more prudent I should be given myself more substantial things to multitask at while this was happening, like planning a manned mission to Pluto or something . . .

. . .It's now 3 days later, with one night shift, one migraine, two excruciatingly sore eyeballs, and cruddy weather within that time. I have my system up and running again. I plugged in the old apps I had (actually used), leaving the rest in the digital oblivion to prevent them from cluttering up my hard drive; one of them was probably responsible for this trouble to begin with. I also took advantage of rigging this baby up with the newest version of MS Office: to crawl out of the primordial ooze of what was Office 2007, and start crawling on solid ground with more cloud-capable features provided with Office 365. It's a hell of a jump, and I'm ashamed I waited this long to come to this point to do this enhancement, and I'm thinking more that my crash that forced me in this direction was a blessing in disguise.

I'm so far impressed with the new features. I'm testing Word's capability of uploading my entry directly to my blog, right now. Office 2007 had the same feature, but it calved on me for some reason ages ago, and I just didn't bother coming back to it. I like the fact that I have more formatting options and better correction utilities at my disposal now. Maybe someday I'll manage to actually get creative with them.