Bad Karma

I guess I’ve been swimming in bad karma or something lately. First, I broke the nice set of Sennheiser HD515 cans I use at work leaving me with the craptacular closed Aiwas I’d used before seeing the light. Then, I broke the belt clip on my cellphone. Fortunately, superglue seems to have solved both problems.

Then, I realized my Thinkpad wasn’t charging like it should. Everything indicated it was charging, but the battery meter kept getting lower. I pulled the AC from the back and reinserted it and the resulting sparks and burnt electronics smell tipped me off that something was amiss. Turns out I had 3 weeks or so left on my 3 year warranty, so I called up support (Monday) had it shipped out the next day (Tuesday), they had it in hand end of the next day (Wednesday), were repairing it the next (Thursday), and according to online tracking have fixed it and should be shipping it back out today (Friday). Assuming it comes back fixed, I’ve been pretty pleased with the overall experience. Added bonus: the support center I talked to was in Atlanta and not India. Seeing as I’ve had this thing for 3 years now and this is the first real problem I’ve had (well, ignoring the part where my cats chewed on the AC adapter), I’ve been quite pleased with the build quality on this machine. Beats the pants off the Dell I had that broke a keycap off the keyboard in less than a month…

On a sadder note, Merry sort of knocked over my external hard drive while it was running, and it sort of ended up running upside-down until I noticed it, and shortly thereafter it started making a weird siren noise and refused to spin up. And since hard drive manufacturers have been pushing capacity/performance/price as hard as they can, they’ve had substantially more reliability/quality control issues than when I first got into computers (I’ve had drives that ran close to continuously for 5+ years before I retired them when I needed more capacity). Now most of them have 1 year warranties if you’re lucky, and mine ran out in January so I’m out of luck.

Maybe all this has been happening since I’ve been so frustrated at work. Who knows. Just seems like a lot of bad juju all at once like this.