Not the Midas Touch

For some reason, as has been documented many times in this journal, I have something of a black thumb when it comes to technology. You’ve seen me writing about laptops with dead batteries and cracked hinges, about hard drive crashes and fried motherboards, about smashed screens on Kindles, about home phones that lose their battery charge in a matter of minutes.

There’s just something about me and my own personal electromagnetic field that is somehow perilous to tech. It’s not ALL bad: I have become VERY good at making sure everything is backed up. And it does keep me on an aggressive upgrade path as well. And it’s not EVERYTHING: I have pretty good cellphone mojo, and my home TV/DVD/Cable/Internet setup seems pretty solid (knock on wood).

But in this past week, I’ve had two more outages: My Macbook Air has been one of the more troubled units – first it was a dead battery. Then it was a broken screen hinge, then I had to have it tuned up because the screen hinge fix came loose, and now it’s in the shop for another dead battery AND the screen hinge has come loose yet again, AND it has a roaring fan. And they took it from me just before some business travel.

I sat and thought: How will I make it through a week or more without my laptop? I have no spare. The work laptop from my current client is locked down very tightly and I can’t use it for anything not on their network (I don’t even take it home anymore – there’s no point). I needed something.

So I’m typing this on a new Macbook Air – the smaller 11” one. I admit to having lust in my heart for this thing since I first saw it months ago. Looking back on my history, I’ve had several very small laptops, and I’ve always loved them – my little Sonys of the early 2000s come to mind. I love having a tiny computer. Pamela, on the other hand, does not love my little computers. She is not as in denial as I am about our age and the eyesight, and she wants big keys and big letters on that screen. We agree to disagree in this realm.

But I sort of resent that my hand was forced on it. The resentment isn’t too bad, because dang it this is an AMAZING laptop. And when the old one comes back from the shop, I’ll work out what to do with it – maybe Pamela will want it, maybe we’ll sell it.

FAR more galling is the fact that my THIRD Kindle has died: Kindle 1 was the small one, and it got a cracked screen. Kindle 2 was the larger DX, which died due to a design flaw – the hooks that hold the cover on can get bent if you open it wrong, prying the case of the kindle apart… which happened. So they sent me another Kindle and another case, and within a month, the case started cracking the side AGAIN, so I took it out and have been using it bareback.

And the other night I took it out of my briefcase (in a pocket without anything else in it), to find the screen completely fritzed out – it looks like a pressure crack, but might “just” be a bad motherboard. Whatever it is, it is dead.

I must now give Amazon some amazing credit here: I called to ask about it, and they said “well, you’re just out of warranty, and it doesn’t sound like you were abusing the unit, so I’m just going to send you another one.” That was at 6pm Friday. At 8:30am Saturday, there was a new Kindle on my porch. WOW.

So now I can get back to work on Infinite Jest. What a crazy book.