Professional "Expertise"....

The following is a brief list of things that, professionally, I am considered an "expert" in: geography, landscape ecology, cartography, and coordinating people, places and things

The following is a brief list of things that, professionally, I am not considered an "expert" in: partitioning hard drives, boot diskettes, backup drives, MS-DOS, and Linux operating systems.

That being said, yesterday I attempted to correctly install a second operating system on my #2 hard drive. Some how in the process, I installed it on my #3 hard drive which is my backup drive which, in turn, erased and reformated my back up drive making me lose everything that was on there. WHO LOSES EVERYTHING ON THEIR BACKUP DRIVE??? Oh yeah, I do because I am an idiot. Doesn't that defeat the entire prupose of a backup drive. It wasn't totally catostrphic. I only lost a few things that were only saved on my backup drive which is a releif.

The real problem is that now because of the shotty installation I did, I can no longer save anything on my #2 hard drive leaving me with no backup drive at all. You may be thinking...why don't you uninstall this new operating system and reformat your two drives. Yep, I would love to but I can't get the goddamn thing to boot up when I start the computer leading me to think I did one extremely shotty job of installing this OS.

The worst part of all of this...I know NOTHING about computers. I should have known better but NO, I decided that it was time for me to learn. I told the IT guy for my department when he offered help..."No, don't worry about it. I would like to figure it out on my own." He gave me a shit eater grin and thumbs up. I should have known then I would be doomed. When I told him yesterday what had happened he just went..."ooohhh" You know the way your parents did when you told them you did something you were really excited about but they thought was 1) extremely dangerous or 2) very stupid. He followed his response with a giggle. He fucking laughed at me. I was having a professional crisis and he giggled at me. So now I wait. I wait for the smug IT guy to come fix it. It's been a full 24 hours now since I asked for help and there has been hide nor hair of the IT guy. I think he is trying to make me sweat. Either that or that smug bastard knows nothing about what I am doing and he is scouring the internet for the cure. All I know is I am in WAY over my head on this one. Not to mention I feel like a total loser posting about an operating system. Whatever! Geek Out!