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(Net)Working for the Weekend

My motto is: When life hands you a long weekend, wring every last everloving bit of sloth out of those three days.

On Friday, I confirmed that our office had today off. Apparently, it’s ‘Columbus Day’, or some such made-up holiday. Why we celebrate some sleepy little town in Ohio is beyond me — I’d have sooner decreed ‘Cincinnati Day’ or even ‘Cleveland Day’ — but I’m not about to look a gift Monday off in the mouth.

“Short of finally breaking down and buying a bedpan for the couch, I can’t think of any other way to accomplish less than I already do.”

I drove home on Friday evening, kissed my wife, and informed her that my goal was to do nothing for the weekend. Nothing. If all goes to plan, I told her, I won’t be wearing pants for the next three days. Just like I said on our honeymoon. And that ill-fated trip to DisneyWorld a few years back. My wife can’t even see a pair of Mickey ears now without blushing. Mission accomplished.

This past weekend went mostly as planned. I did clean up and look presentable — yes, including wearing a pair of pants — on Sunday night. But what red-blooded red meat-eating man can argue when his wife says:

‘Hey, why don’t we go the sports bar for a burger and beers and watch some football?‘

Not this man, I’ll tell you that. I knew I married the right girl.

I (re-)learned a lesson this weekend, too. After a full day of lounging on the couch, watching sports and growing facial hair, I decided I should do something productive. With so much of the weekend left to waste, why not take a break and be useful for a while?

Big mistake.

My goal was to set up a simple home network, so that my machine upstairs — the one with all the MP3s, and connected to the printer — could talk to my wife’s laptop and my fancy, shiny new notebook I bought a couple of weeks ago. All I wanted was to share the music and the printer. I figured that working towards a goal itself rooted in laziness — so I could rock the house or print out boobie porn without getting my fat ass off the living room couch — wouldn’t anger the gods of ‘Doing No Work on the Weekends’. If they’d let this one small effort slide, then I could do even less on subsequent weekends. Short of finally breaking down and buying a bedpan for the couch, I can’t think of any other way to accomplish less than I already do.

Turns out I was wrong. My feeble attempts to interconnectatize computers on an ‘off’ day were met with nothing but pain, frustration, and ‘Domain does not exist!’ errors. The weekend gods gave me a big fat virtual swirly, heavy on the fudge sauce.

In the end, it went down like this: at six in the evening on Saturday, I created a workgroup on the desktop machine, thus beginning the simple and straightforward (according to MicroSoft) networking setup process.

By eleven pm on Saturday night, I had royally futzed up my new laptop, and become intimately familiar with a little hidden partition on the hard drive that allows you to restore the machine to its ‘factory state’. That doesn’t mean I’d managed to actually restore the machine, mind you. Just that I was intimately familiar with bits of the machine that no pre-lobotomy opposable-thumbed biped should ever have to access. Again, according to the boys and girls at MicroShaft.

By three o’clock on Monday morning, I finally had the damned thing more or less working again. The operating system was back, I’d re-installed a decent browser and other goodies, and turned off all the factory-installed bullshit that makes the machine run as though it’s been dipped in molasses. All I really lost were a few bookmarks and the kick-ass Madden team I’d been working on.

Also, the will to ever, ever, ever attempt to set up a home network again. From now on, if I want to hear Soul Coughing on the couch, I’ll walk upstairs to the desktop box, start an MP3, and crank the living shit out of those speakers so the sound reaches the living room. When my wife — or the neighbors, or the office park across the street — complain, I’ll calmly and rationally explain to them that it’s the only reasonable solution in a world where I love listening to music and MicroSlut networking sucks big hairy buffalo balls.

Unless, of course, they complain on a weekend, in which case I’m not even going to bother explaining. I’ll just lie on the couch, listening to tunes and shoving Cheetos down my gullet like a good lazy weekend boy. I’ve learned my lesson.