A little shock and awe. Highlights.

Received several calls from a friend. A home office Windows environment was in a meltdown. I refuse to touch Winblows anymore. Calls and pleas kept coming. Finally caved against my judgements formed over years of observing Windows meltdowns. They are close friends.

The rescue has been a drill and a half. I get to it now and then, in between everything else going on. Process drug on by the fact that the gentleman, a fine man, wants to be watching and asking questions every step of the way. Slows things to a crawl, but I allowed it since he is a friend.

Cut to the end, so I thought. A last challenge is also what I consider to be the least important in the priority list. Hardly gave it a second thought. That of getting World of Warcraft to work on a shared machine that belongs to his Missus. I mean, this hardly on my radar in terms of importance. Turns out, 'tis.

Why, you wonder?

The game is for their nephew, who is living with them. Not even thinking about the requirements, I threw it into a "Virtual Machine" environment. Well, it didn't work. Not enough space. Ok, so I remake the VM machine and give it gobs of room. v2 fails. Not enough space. Oooook, so I create v3 into what I think is the mother of all VM space environments. Each build takes approx 2 hours to complete, plus the 20 miles drive to slap it into the machine. You guessed... failed. So I go up there and build v4 on the machine. By this time I am burning some serious hours. Hey, I gots places to go, peoples to meet, stuff ya know.

v4 fails. This time it is a video bridge issue.

Grrrrrrr. So now I am rebuilding the whole machine, creating what is called a dual boot setup, absolutely NOT what I wanted to do, or be doing, at this stage of the recovery from a badly hacked, hashed, corrupted set of machines. I only acquiesced because they are older, really about to lose stuff, and hey, sometimes I can be a nice guy. Thinking I would squeeze it in when I had an hour here and there.

So will return the machine to the missus in a couple of days.

Oh, I forgot to mention... the nephew is 43 years old. Unemployed. For the last 5 weeks since I have been popping in and out, his car has not moved an iota from its parking spot. He has a 19 year old son about to deploy to Iraq. He has made absolutely 0 effort to look for a job from what I see. He is unquestionably living off their good graces, but at times has been rude, the entitled kind, etc. In the 5 weeks, he's held out that his great contribution to living on earth has been to deal with some pine trees on their several acre wooded property. He's managed to stack approximately 1/8th a cord of firewood in all this time, and some branches. Hell, I fell, cut to 20-24" stove size, load, drive 50 miles, and reload 2 to 3 cords of wood in a day. Then split it with Armstrong which ain't no big thang either.

Every call I have received for a week is about getting World of Warcraft to work for this lazy, 43 year old man kid.

Shock and awe.

The interruptions have been legion and did put the kibosh on it. Kicker is... the aunt and uncle's solution to helping this grownup kid get out of his doldrums? Let me mention that they belong to the New Life mega church, of Ted Haggard gay infamy. Look it up if that doesn't resonate. But their solution is to pray for their nephew. That's it. Pray.

It doesn't seem to be working. Hard to believe. I have never quite seen anything like this. Brings new meaning to the word, enabling.

Ok, there it is. So, the question is Ms H and anyone else... what would you say or do after having observed this situation? Aside from making an overexplained joke out of it here... what?