We all do stupid things. I'm no exception. Recently a moment’s frustration set me up to lose the most productive part of a day. I like to start early, an hour or even two of time alone in the mornings can really help with staying on top of things. It’s that time when I get to take care of the items that are important to me, before I get hit with the needs of others. One day I lost over an hour and a half of that key time because of a stupid action at the end of the previous day.
It was just after 7PM on a day when I had started at 6AM. I was tired, had a headache and was looking forward to getting home. Having shut down my computer I wandered around to say goodnight to those sad souls that were working an even longer day than me. Whilst talking to one of them, (my slave-driving boss) I made a commitment to do something. I turned my computer back on, changed my mind and turned it back off using the power button. My desire to get home meant that I did not wait for it to get to the logon screen and then shut down from there.
The next morning my Vista computer would not boot. I really like Vista, it offered to rebuild itself (a big fat "NO" from me) or to try a repair. I chose the repair option. After about 10 minutes (it felt like hours) Vista reported that it could not fix all errors and I would need to reinstall. However I found that it had repaired enough that I could start the PC and log on. After that I had to run another group of fix’s which took about an hour and a half. With great relief I was then in and working, but it was now 8:30 and the phone calls, emails etc took over the day.
If I had waited just another 2 minutes the night before I would not have lost all that time the next morning. We see the same with people installing updates on shutdown. They will often wait for those to finish before going home. If it’s a big update they will get frustrated and turn the computer off and then "bang" - the next day there are problems. With updates you can just leave them; the computer will turn itself off. In my case I should have known better, I was very lucky that I know a good engineer who could sort it for me.