Windows: “I gotchu, fam.”

I think OP is referring to NAT hairpinning though.

Between 6-10 hours of what?

edit: oh, you mean the xkcd, LOL. Well let me know if it works out for you haha

Some BIOSes have trouble booting anything other than Windows, so some distros default to clobbering the Windows Boot Manager and trying to manage everything from GRUB. It sounds to me like this is what happened to you except it somehow got borked.

If the Windows install is still present on your drive it should be possible to restore the Windows Boot Manager. Then you won’t be able to boot Linux but you’ll at least be able to get into Windows.

Try booting off Windows install media and running Startup Repair using the following instructions: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-client/performance/windows-boot-issues-troubleshooting#method-1-startup-repair-tool

If that doesn’t work try one of these solutions:

https://superuser.com/questions/460762/how-can-i-repair-the-windows-8-efi-bootloader

https://superuser.com/questions/612830/how-to-reinstall-windows-boot-manager-on-efi-partition

Good luck!

Also relevant xkcd

In fact, autistic burnout is a thing that can happen to autistic folks (as opposed to occupational burnout)

Eh, this is a classic joke by now. There’s those jokes on the Windows side too (like the ‘delete system32’ one).

Microsoft and Apple have offices around the world though, so it doesn’t really make sense

The use of ‘railroad’ instead of ‘railway’ would seem to indicate American English