What a month.

March 2009, this month shall remain in my mind’s calender as one of the most horrible months ever. And to think half of it is still left. I wonder how much worse it can get. I’ll not make any guesses because life loves screwing around and it would probably beat my expectations.

Not a single day has passed with my folks not shouting at me. It’s not like they stopped shouting any time but this month has been bad. The mother shouts at me every time she sees me. Unfortunately that happens before college and I don’t think I have gone to college in a good mood on even one day. And the people and situations that greet me there don’t help the mood much, either. The dad starts shouting at me as soon as he comes home. It has almost become some sort of a routine. We come, we meet and we start shouting at each other. Ultimately one of us gets pissed off, slams the door in the other persons face and goes away. And that person almost always happens to be me because the other two team up. It’s natural. Thank God I don’t have a sister/brother because she/he would have totally ganged up with them to be on the good side. Sometimes it feels as if politics is going on in the house itself? Why can’t we have voting to elect the leaders in the house? I wouldn’t mind shouting at everyone for a change. But then again, I would never win that election.

And then it’s not just that. The Guitar went away too. It was borrowed and had to go away one day or the other and it chose this month. My friend had to pick his relative over me. Khoon ka rishta > Dosti ka rishta, I don’t blame him. The folks said they would buy me a new guitar but me being me doesn’t want to buy the same model again. Me wants to buy either a Gibson, or a Fender, or a Hobner all of which are horribly expensive. So the guitar is on hold for now, I’ll probably save money and buy it around my birthday. That means all my plans to learn it and become a rockstar shall be postponed. I just hope I manage to become one before I’m 90 or something. Maybe I’ll have a band of oldies and we’ll call ourselves the Toothless Tic Tac Toe’s. Or something.

And if the bad things had stopped there, you wouldn’t be reading this post. Next, the Lady in Red started screwing up on me. One fine day, it just froze. I pressed the power button, restarted and it went into system recovery. It failed to complete the recovery but managed to boot Windows just fine. All was well. Till it decided to freeze again the next morning. This time it refused to boot into Windows. I had to rush to college so I left it there. Upon coming back, I tried booting but it wouldn’t work. Safe mode wouldn’t work either. Diagnostics didn’t show any errors initially. So I got worried and decided to call Dell. But wait, it’s my life right? So it had to screw up. I dialed at 5:58 PM and by the time I had managed to enter the Inspiron division, support was closed. That was when I panicked because there was some 160 Gigs of data that had to be backed up. What followed was downloading and installing around 5 versions of Linux and everything failing on me. Finally, I managed to get Knoppix running from a pen drive. Must thank Ashish for suggesting it. I managed to back up my data into a friend’s computer and 17, yes, 17 DVD’s. Called Dell the next day, they made me run some diagnostics and errors started coming up in the Hard Disk. Apparently some boots and sectors had gotten corrupted. They told me they’d replace the hard drive and so they did. Their engineer came on Monday, tried booting Windows, didn’t work. He then inserted my re-installation DVD and repaired Windows hoping that all my data, including that on the Windows partition would be saved. Sadly, that didn’t happen and the entire C: got formatted much to the shock of the engineer. The OS however was working perfectly, except a flicker which used to happen 40 seconds after booting up. I, however, was not exactly convinced because when the OS was installing, it had isolated the bad sectors and installed the Windows in the remaining partition. That would have meant that I would lose out on some HDD space. I asked the guy to run diagnostics just once for my sake and there, it showed the same errors all over again. So I asked him to change the HDD and so he did. He then formatted the drives and initiated the Vista installation. He was getting late so he asked me to complete the rest of the process myself, which, if I might add could have got him fired. But he was a nice guy so I didn’t bother. The flickering kept going after the new Vista installation as well. So I called Dell again and this time some female who had been getting all “weird” problems (her words, not mine) since the morning picked up. I think I made her read the entire Vista forums but the problem couldn’t be sorted out. “Aaj mera din hi kharaab hai“, she said. “Mera toh mahina hi kharaab chal raha hai“, I would have said. I flashed the BIOS and updated the drivers and it worked out in the end. Oh, and I also called that engineer again to tell him that flickering was still going on. Poor guy was totally frustrated and said, “Sir kya hai, it just flickers once na. Big deal, sabke laptops mein hota hai, I can’t do anything” and I was like okay, fine, gussa kyun ho raha hai yaar. I won’t be surprised if Dell has recorded my number in the black list or weirdo list or something. One day they would all be playing Truth and Dare and one of them would come up with a dare like, “Us pagal ka phone aayega toh tereko attend karna padega! Haha!” and the one who got the dare would go, “Nahiiiiiii, tauba tera jalwa, tauba tera pyaar, mat karo mere pe aisa emosanal atyachaar!“. Well, who ever is picking up the phone next time, meri taraf se abhi se sorry, okay?

And now for the latest blow. I think most of you must be knowing that I was getting inhuman download speeds of 60 Kbps on my 128K connection. The default stands at somewhere between 8 and 16. Anyway, I was getting 60 and I was pretty delighted. I downloaded tons of movies, tons of softwares, watched tons of Youtube videos and many soccer matches on live streaming. All the illegal stuff you can do on a high-speed connection basically. And then one find day, around 2 days ago, Airtel managed to fix their servers and my download speed now stands at 14 Kbps. 60 Kbps down to 14 Kbps, can you imagine? Now I’m used to things downloading so fast and I’ve been losing my patience and deleting downloads halfway because they were too slow. I still have to download and install Quick Time + iTunes. How I will do that, I haven’t a clue. What I do know however that it’s goodbye movies, goodbye youtube, goodbye live streaming and goodbye lots of other things. *sigh* What a month. *sigh*

Worst part is it’s not even over yet. Exams start on the 29th and looking at the way things are going, I wouldn’t be too hopeful.