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There's Mondays I arrive at work aware that the weekend hasn't quite provided the attitude lift I need. In those cases, it will take a morning of struggle to shift back into work mode.

This Monday, I couldn't afford that scene. For a variety of reasons, I was behind and needed a productive morning.

But as I settled into my desk filled with resolve, my computer wouldn't boot. A laptop of the kind represented in recent commercials by a well-dressed cool character paired with a slightly disheveled neurotic dysfunctional guy, it had worked perfectly well at home during the weekend. But Monday morning on my desk, it couldn't get past a spinning wheel icon. My hard drive was nowhere to be found.

Applying my vast computer knowledge, I rebooted. No luck.

"What's different from yesterday?" I asked myself. The computer was cool to the touch, having ridden in the backseat of my car from Baldwin. So I figured I'd let it warm and reboot again.

No luck.

I'd exhausted my diagnostic skills short of giving the laptop a good whack. As satisfying as that might have been, I resisted.

Instead, I called the IT department. The surest way to look like an idiot I know is to call IT. Someone there will make a simple request or ask a question like: "Could you open up the accounts file in system preferences?"

Now that's really straight forward and child's play? Look, when I was in high school, we had slide rules and manual typewriters. I know when I open the laptop and hit the on/off button, the screen gets bright and I can use certain programs with some degree of competence. That I survive in a career requiring I be joined at the fingertips to a computer is in itself an accomplishment.

The first thing I was asked was, had I rebooted. Aha, I thought, I was on the right track. Lots, I said. Then came instructions to reboot holding down various command keys. There were some promising "bongs" but still nothing beyond the spinning wheel.

It became apparent the laptop wasn't going to boot. My choices were to wait until someone could get to the office or take it to Lawrence, or as a past office mate called it "The Mother Ship." There was really only one option because I needed the computer and there was no assurance when a technician could make it to Eudora to service the laptop.

So I drove the 10 minutes to the IT nerve center. I was led to a workspace the size of my front porch, crammed with computers and crowded with desks. I counted eight different laptops. Two antiquated towers looked to have found a second life as pedestals holding up a tabletop. There was -- you guessed it -- a fantasy poster of a dragon, but only one and it was above a corner desk. Truthfully, these guys -- and they were all guys -- weren't geeks with shirts buttoned to the collar and horn-rimmed glasses. Cool and laid-back is how I'd characterize them, and complete nonplused about my crisis. The remedy for that was simply to run a first-aid disk in the CD drive.

Of more concern was a large tower from another weekly with a serious identity problem. At one time, three of the IT guys looked over the shoulder of the tech sitting in front of a laptop hooked to the sick machine saying things like, "It should be in the DCMB folder," or some such.

I was told the disk in my computer was running it through a 12-step recovery program. I imagined the laptop admitting, "I'm Elvyn's computer, and I have a boot problem." After running through denial, anger, blame and other emotions it would make its painful way to access. And that's exactly what happened. As I was handed the laptop, I was comforted by the sight of all the familiar icons spread across the screen.

Someone should market one of those Monday morning disks for the meat side of the modern office partnership.