Technologically Driven Insane

Wow. What a week!

So a week ago Friday, I went for a fourth interview (this time, it was face-to-face) for this traveling job. Afterward, on the drive back to Michigan, I received a call stating that this employer had one more task for me to do before they can make a final determination. That last task was to come up with a 20-minute presentation on any topic (healthcare related) I wanted. Online.

Yeah.

But the thing is, I really really want this job and I truly like the aspect of teaching; which is what this job mainly entails. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of presenting, because I’m used to doing that. Naw … it was more the whole, “What the h*ll am I going to present?” part that intimidated me. I had a week to come up with a topic to discuss and write up an entire Powerpoint presentation on!

So with that in mind, last Saturday I sat at the local Borders researching topics online and narrowing it down to what I wanted to discuss. From there, it was bookmarking links on the web and writing up with an entire outline on a Word document. By Monday night, I had all my slides done and had planned on working on the actual delivery and timing of the presentation over the next couple of days.

Tuesday morning, I went to “wake up” my MacBook only to find all the applications had frozen. After not being able to “Force Quit” out of the applications, I ended up having to do a “Hard Restart.” (Which, may I add, I’ve only had to do once in my entire life of using Apple Products … unlike <cough> PCs <cough> which crashed on me all the time … ) The minute I heard the unnatural clicking sound,  I knew I was screwed. And the Mac Genius at the local Apple Store confirmed my nightmare; an unrepairable hard drive.

A hard drive that hadn’t been backed up since April. One that had my entire presentation stored on it, as well as all the outlines and bookmarked websites I used for research.

I was So. Screwed.

Luckily, Hubby let me use his laptop (our only other functioning computer … of which he uses for all his freelance work) to redo my entire presentation. In the meantime, we waited for a new hard drive to be overnighted so that I’d be able to have it ready for the actual presentation date. And in the course of the next few days, everything kinda fell into place.

Yesterday, I did my presentation and I’m pretty sure it went well. I’m just waiting for the final word from HR and hopefully this will mean that I will soon be employed once again. <crosses fingers>

Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone out there for your prayers and good vibes. They came in very handy this past week.

Now if we can only get our home internet stuff straightened out …