Sucking It Up: Smart Bro Style

Every drone knows that the way to your boss' heart and mind (and possibly a longer tenure at the company) is to suck it up. In this light, when a drone is given even a minute opportunity to do so, he or she grabs it. In this case: fixing my boss' HP 500 laptop.

My boss was discussing with Paul, a newly promoted supervisor and my office best friend that her laptop was bent out of shape and needed a good formatting. The problem was that she did not have drivers for the laptop and all the wireless connections in our office were secure and needed WPA logins. Also, her Smart Bro Wireless was out of range of any distinguishable signal. So they offered to fix it, and the next thing I knew, me, RJ (another sup and friend), Paul, and my boss were on her way to her house (during the billable hours of our shifts) to pick up her wounded workhorse.

After picking up the laptop, we headed off to Jollibee for her treat (the inconspicious payment for the services we will render) then back to the office to perform the task. And so we did. 30 long minutes later the laptop had Windows XP running smoothly however, still had no audio or a decent resolution to work with. I then drove back home where I had wi-fi to download the drivers for her PC. After downloading all the crap that was necessary to run the thing I decided it was time to try if the Smart Bro thing worked. I first tried it on my PC and it worked like a charm, or probably less as the connection matched only the fastest dial-up around. Now the clincher, trying it on the laptop.

It did not work.

I then mustered all the neurons I could at 6 in the morning to troubleshoot what was going on to no avail. I tried uninstalling then reinstalling it, but still, no go. Finally I went back to the office like a fallen hero, only for her to have it checked at the nearest HP Service Center. I'll probably get terminated in a day or so.



** Smart Bro image from yugatech.