Oh No'es, My Toes!

It was a clear case of that new, old adage; "One good deed goes appreciated but no two good deeds go unpunished."

Things started like this...

Last week was very bad at work. We started good but a major mid-week service failure on the part of a vendor we are working on a project, brought things to a crashing halt.  We had to work on a recovery and response strategy, do some "Root Cause Analysis" and determine if we would continue with a planned Friday night project deployment, or scrub it.

Big decision as we had invested a lot of time and resources to that Friday night cutover.

In the end the task-force decided on caution and the event was indeed scrubbed.  This meant a rare early Friday night return home to the Valca family homestead.  It was a positive thing and nice to see both our teams and upper managers as well the vendor's teams all working closely together during this problem. Looked to be a great weekend. Might even go catch the rare movie out in the theatre.

Saturday began lazy enough.  We all slept in a bit later than normal.  The girls had a baby-shower down in the Clear Lake area so I was looking forward to a good three or more hours around the house by myself.

I took care of a few easy by-the-ways, then did some light Web surfing.

Finally I got around to doing my "Good Deed."

Good Deed #1 underway.

See when Dad replaced his old dinosaur of XP system, we had decided to leave his old system on the original drive for a while, just in case he found I didn't port some important data over to his new Vista  system.

Now, almost six-months later, he decided he was free and clear, wanted to donate it to their local St. Paul's society church fundraiser, and took up my advice to have his drive securely wiped of the data and contents before passing it on.

He had brought the main system box down to me from Tyler during one of his weekly returns. It's been cooking in our coat-closet for about a month. Figured now was as good a time to wipe it as any.

You may not believe this, but I don't (yet) actually have a pc workbench at our humble home.  To do a wipe I had two options; first I could remove the hard-drive, drop it into my portable USB drive housing, then wipe it off my main system, or two, I could unplug one of our two desktop systems and just borrow the cordage and monitor.

I opted for #2.  Our XP desktop system is running dual monitors and I have a few octopuses worth of cables attached to that tiny Shuttle SFF pc.  Not a good candidate for a swap-out.  That left Alvis's old SAM Linux Dell system in her room.  She was gone.  Yep. Perfect.

So I cleared a path across the floor of her bedroom, and pulled out her system and swapped out with Dad's.

I loaded up Darik's Boot and Nuke (Hard Drive Disk Wipe) boot CD and started the wipe process going. Used a good-old DoD-Short 3-pass wipe. 

Now here is where I went wrong.

See as I exited Alvis's room, I noticed that one of her shoes and a cast-off purse were left in the doorway.

Begin Good Deed #2: The Downfall

As I and my siblings have had safety ingrained into us from a very early age, I knew that was a dangerous trip hazard and set about instinctively to kick them out of the way and up against the door.

Only while the instinct part of my brain reacted and sent my foot a-kickin', the logical part of my brain must still have been on the progress of Dad's PC wipe.  See what one part of my brain failed to notice before the other part could, was that where I was positioned, the walls made a bit of a "bump-out" and sheetrock covering corner wall-studs existed between my foot's takeoff point and the shoe and purse.

The trajectory of my foot at a firm rate of speed brought my bare toes into quick and full contact with the wall.

I heard a series of cracks that sounded, fascinatingly enough at the moment, just like a stalk of baby celery being snapped in half.

It actually took about twenty seconds for the pain in my toes to register and bring me down to the hallway carpet floor.

Bummer.

So the rest of the my free "Man's Day" at the house was spend, rightly so, on the couch with a cold-pack wrapped around my foot and nothing on TV or the Net.

Recovery

Lavie and Alvis eventually returned and I did get a measured amount of sympathy, but certainly not enough to justify the experience.

I later hobbled back when the pc wipe was well past done, gingerly swapped the systems back, set the wiped case by the door to go back to Dad, and collapsed again on the couch.  I have skirted that shoe and purse where they remained, untouched since failed attempt at Good Deed #2 like a cat skirting a pool of water.

Today my middle toe is much more purple, like Alvis painted it with her most brilliant hues of watercolors.  I can walk on it though. Enough to do some errands about town this afternoon and cut the patch of grass we call our back yard.

Fortunately, I am very pain-tolerant and have wide-feet, which means most of my shoes have nice and roomy box-toe tips.  It it gets too bad, I suppose I can tape it together with one of its undamaged neighbors. I've done that before.

Having probably broken most of them anyway, they are pretty loose and limp.  I never could do "monkey-toes" like Alvis and pick up tiny things with them like she can. Best I can manage is a sock or shirt of the floor.

So Dad's old pc is now securely wiped and so is one of the toes on my foot.

Maybe I can get a sympathy dinner out of it from him....barbeque sounds good.

--Claus