Electronics melt down

This was a bad BAD month for electronics around the house. I lost our phone one day. I found it. It was in my coat pocket. The coat that had JUST been washed. Yeah, the phone hasn't worked properly since.

A few weeks later I lost my ipod. I found it. in the pocket of my other coat. The other coat that had just been washed also. The ipod never made so much as a whimper or quiver. It was just plain dead.

We also moved our computer out of our spare bedroom so that Mandy's sister could move in for a while. I hooked up a USB wireless adapter to the computer so that we could still enjoy the benefits of the world wide super interwebs. You know so, I can update this blog and make sure all of my friends are doing well on their Mafiaville Farm Wars on Facebook.

So I moved the computer and installed the software for the Netgear USB adapter. Everything works as it should and this little plastic doodad magically pulls the intersupernets right out of thin air. I don't know how it does it. It's all magic to me and I am thoroughly impressed and also satisfied with my purchase.

Then one day the computer suddenly dies. I get the blue screen of death. It tells me something about a driver conflict and some cryptic message on how to fix it.

Having me work on a computer is about like your redneck gunsmith who scratches his head with the barrel of your broken pistol, looks down the barrel and says "Huh, I dunno what's it could be? Somefin jis ain't right with it." as he stares into the barrel with one eye closed and pulls the trigger a few times. "If'n it wuz wurkin rightly my face woulda looked like swiss cheez ba now!" he says with a toothless grin.

I start removing and reinstalling drivers, the whole time restarting and cycling the power on the computer. Then one time when I restarted the computer the hard drive started groaning and grumbling like it was a garbage disposal and the computer would not boot. This is the hard drive with the book I am working on. The hard drive with all of our family videos converted from VHS. The hard drive with all of our family photos on it. The electronic device on the end of a series of tragically destroyed devices.

You know that instant when your knee jerk reaction is to pick something up and smash it? That was me at that moment. I wanted to break the computer. I knew it only make things worse if I did. So I sat there for a few seconds and imagined how satisfying it would be to ripe the mother board out and stomp on it. To see the resistors, chips and capacitors spraying off in shattered disarray. Instead I grit my teeth, leaned in real close to the computer and whispered through clamped teeth "You-are-NOT-dying-now! not-on-MY-clock!" and I left it sitting there to think about what it had done. I did not return until several days later when I had some advice from a coworker that sometimes... maybe... if the moon was in the right position in the sky and the prevailing winds came from the right direction and the right speed and the humidity was perfect and the ambient temperature was within the area referred to as "The Golden Temperature" you can flip a decrepit and expiring hard drive over and it MIGHT work if just for a few seconds. I tried it. It worked. It didn't sound pretty but it was booting.

It took a long time booting. I left it and went and ran some errands, cut my toenails, brushed my driveway off with a mascara brush and tentatively checked back on the computer. It was just finished restarting after what it was calling a "recovery" Which I learned at that moment meant. Erase everything and reinstall windows. I sat silently for a few more seconds as I imagined how satisfying it would be to hear the computer crunching and crushing under the weight of the car. I sighed and produced the other half of my two pronged attack. A new hard drive. It came with a program that copied everything, bit for bit over to the new hard drive. I ran the program. Checked to make sure the new hard drive had all of the whatever was left of the information on the old hard drive and then I unplugged the old hard drive and took great satisfaction in taking it apart and showing Walker what the guts of a hard drive look like. I still have the disks from the old hard drive. I plan on showing Walker what the insides of a hard drive look like when they interact with a projectile from a high caliber rifle.

The new hard drive works great. To end on a happy note, I found the old files from the old hard drive before the "recovery" buried deep in the file structure of the hard drive. I found our videos. I found our pictures and most of all, I found my book. But now my USB wireless adapter no longer worked. Join us next time for the exciting tale of me Vs. tech support in India. You don't want to miss it. I get yelled at. Until next time... Hasta