You cannot trust machines. At least, I cannot.
Sunday when I got to church for choir practice, I learned the organ had reset its memory. All my stops were gone. It’s like your hard drive crashing, and you get the system reloaded without any problem, but your files are gone (Oooo! foreshadow much, Katrina?). Worse, we had choir practice that didn’t end until right before I was supposed to start playing prelude, so I wouldn’t have time to replace them before I needed them.
I said a few choice words about the organ company and stomped around a bit — this organ has never worked right, not even brand new. Is it any wonder the company went out of business? Then I sat at the organ through practice, singing with choir while I tried to remember the presets I use the most. I didn’t sing very well, but I did get five of the 20 or so presets finished before I had to play the prelude.
Ironically, the organ sounded better than I’ve ever heard it. But that turned out to be the start of a series of days (which, please, please, please!, are hopefully over) in which things fell apart at an alarming rate.
And of course, it’s the worst possible timing. I am booked back-to-back for most of this week. My writing time was even cut into some, which is particularly bad because I have an incredible opportunity right now (more on this later, I hope).
Monday, my cell phone broke. This is a new phone – I only bought it after I realized I didn’t want a first generation iPhone after all. It’s just the casing that’s damaged (a chunk of plastic broke off), but it’s right at the hinge. And this is a flip-phone. So I’ll be talking away and move my head the tiniest bit, and the phone flops closed, cutting off my call. Or it bends the other way (think: dislocated knee), which is going to make it stop working completely. It was not a cheap phone — I was tired of my phones breaking — and it’s too soon for the company to help replace it.
Tuesday went OK during the day, but things soured after I met the schoolbus. I was changing for a dinner to honor flood volunteers when Mad Scientist walked into my bedroom.
“I need to use your bathroom,” he said. “The water’s too high in mine.”
I went shrieking into the main bath to find it stopped up with filthy brown water and way too much toilet paper. There wasn’t enough room to even use a plunger without spilling it all over the floor. And I didn’t have time to deal with it anyway. I just announced the bathroom off-limits and went back to changing my clothes. (Magically, it healed itself in the evening while I was at Pilates — see why I adore my guy?!)
Off I went. Errands, dinner, Pilates. At one point, I stopped to take a picture of one of those church signs that have funny sayings because I wanted to share it with you. And, since I got the new camera cord from Kodak yesterday (the old one was stolen), I could!
I came home, plugged the camera into the computer, and opened it — only to find a message that said, “I’m sorry. Firefox quit again when you tried to open it after it quit the first time.” I clicked on the button to go ahead and close it and reached for the restart. Before I got my mouse to the menu though, I got another message saying iPhoto had also quit. I watched systematically as every program I had running — Word, Mail, iTunes, etc. — crashed. Weird! When nothing was running but the Finder, I restarted the computer.
Or rather, I tried to. It didn’t come back. I got the blue screen, OK, but right after the message that said the system software was loading, it went black, and all I saw was a weird, DOS-type prompt that said “login.”
Sigh. I fiddled a little, tried to log-in (though I’ve NEVER seen that screen on a Mac before), and finally gave up to go to bed. My sweet Mars did a “safe start” (I think that means with extensions off) and ran a Disk Utility to repair the drive, but it failed. 
So, smack in the middle of my double-booked week and instead of working, I have to make the three-hour drive (round trip) to Portland to the Apple service center.
I fear, however, that my trusty little laptop — the machine on which I have written three novels (well, two novels and about 80 percent of a third) — has gone to the Great Toxic Electronics Landfill in the Sky.
And this is only Wednesday morning. What other machines lie snickering behind my back, waiting for the worst possible moment to melt into a molten puddle of noxious chemicals and heavy metals?
April 30, 2008 at 12:30 pm |
Yikes, what a day.
I had a cell phone in college that suffered a similar fate. It had been quite reliable, until one day (I must have banged it against something!) the little part in the flip-phone-arm fell off. So, for the rest of a semester, I had to baby the phone and treat it very carefully.
I replaced it with a similar phone (one model newer, but otherwise the same), because it had been fairly reliable. That phone worked well for at least three years. But then one day, as I was loading my car, I somehow dropped the phone RIGHT UNDER MY TIRE!!! When I backed out of the driveway, the tire rolled right over the phone. Miraculously, it still worked… barely. I had to replace it a month later.
April 30, 2008 at 9:34 pm |
Oh man, that must make it difficult to walk through your kitchen. I can only imagine it must be tough to convince yourself that, no, your toaster oven is in fact not snickering malevolently at you behind your back.
Also, hugs.
ps: even though I run vista of all things, I keep a linux livedisc around for emergencies. Now, I’ll just sit around and wait until you get around to the inevitable question.