Somebody other than me 2 November 2009

I swear, I have a curse.  If it’s electronic in nature, it’s going to go south on me.

I first noticed it in college.  Every time I walked across campus at night, at least one streetlight would pop as I walked underneath it.  It got to that I didn’t even startle when it happened, though my friends who walked with me would jump.  It still happens, though with less frequency now that I’m not out and about at night.  But as Beanie and I left Poolie’s house after we’d had dinner, the light under which we’d parked blew out.

That’s probably why the transformer popped the night of the really bad ice storm back in Washington state.  It was December 2006, and we’d gotten about four inches of snow and a thick layer of ice.  The power went out at 9pm the night before, so I went to bed.  Not much to do when the power’s out.  I read for a bit by flashlight and slept till almost 9am the next morning.  That’s when the power came back on, and I congratulated myself on sleeping through the whole thing.  Not fifteen minutes later, I heard a muffled pop — and the power went out again.  I looked around my neighborhood, and it appeared as though I was the only person in the neighborhood without power.  Come to find out, the transformer at the end of the driveway had popped, cutting power to my house, my next-door neighbor’s house, and the two houses across the street.  Even though power workers were in my neighborhood that day, fixing downed lines, it took them a couple more days before they came out to make the simple fifteen-minute fix to my transformer.  I ended up staying with a neighbor, as it was only 40º in my house by then.  My heat and my stove at the time were all run on electricity, so I couldn’t even cook food for myself and Grace.  It was pretty bad.

Did I mention Kurt had just left on deployment?  He kept calling the power company from Mexico to try to get them to come out more quickly.  I’m not sure it worked.  Thank goodness for my kind neighbors.

Every computer I have had has gone back in one way, shape, or form.  The first desktop Kurt and I had, it ended up with a corrupted version of IE, and there is no way to remove IE and reinstall if it becomes corrupted.  So we bought another desktop, and made the permanent switch to Firefox.  After a few years, the new desktop too went south.  It won’t even boot!  It sits in my closet, awaiting the day when I feel like reformatting the damn thing.

Damn Windows.

Then you have my HP laptop, whose hard drive died after only 15 months.

And my bad luck isn’t restricted to computers.  Remember my oven?  How it wouldn’t heat one day and had to have its glow plug replaced?

My pink Casio point-and-shoot developed an oddity where it wouldn’t stay on, and it would display something akin to the Blue Screen of Death that we Windows users are quite familiar with.  I would have to pop out the battery for a few moments to get it to work again, but it would do the same thing after only a few minutes.  (Kurt used the Casio while I was in San Diego and reported no issues, which just confirms to me that it’s me that’s the problem.)

My brand-new iPod?  It can’t seem to find my location, instead insisting that I live on a cul-de-sac in El Paso, Texas, which is a good two thousand miles away from my actual location in Rhode Island.  After searching through the help forums and turning off my iPod and resetting all my settings back to factory defaults, I contacted Apple, who had me restore my brand-spankin’ new iPod.  Gah.  And it’s still telling me I live in El Paso.

And tonight?  I turned on my little Nikon point-and-shoot, the one I bought to replace the pink Casio back in July, only to get a lens error.  It would extend and retract the lens, all the while beeping in distress, before displaying “LENS ERROR” on the screen.  *sigh*  The help forums tells me to recharge the battery, and if that doesn’t work, leave the battery out of the camera overnight.  If that doesn’t work, I have to send it in.

You know, I would like my things to just work for a reasonable amount of time and not crap out at me every time I turn around.  Is that really too much to ask?