Mr. Electronics

Dave Barry once said he didn't believe in the molecular theory of matter until he got the Death Flu one winter, and was able to feel every individual air molecule bouncing off his skin.

Similarly, I have had a hard time believing in certain New Age ideas such as auras and energy fields that are supposed to surround all living things. But now I'm beginning to wonder. If such things do exist, I know that my own personal electromagnetic aura (his name is Ralph) kills semiconductors.

Oh, not immediately. That would be too easy. It's a slower, more painful process, spread out over the life of the extended one-year warranty.

I was reminded of this today as I was attempting to back up my small external hard drive to my medium external hard drive at work (obsessive, you say, backing up my backup? Anal retentive? YOU take Ralph for a while, then we'll talk). Every few minutes it would just quit. Power down. Stop. Kaput. In the middle of trying to transfer files. I was sure it was dead.

See, it would have been the fourth hard drive failure in the past 18 months for me. I had just broken in my new work computer last May when its hard drive failed and I had to re-load everything. My computer before that one also had a new hard drive because its first one failed. I had an external drive at home that quit, too. I managed to save most of that data after spending $80 and most of an evening. Cheap at the price. Today, I thought about trying to save the data on my small drive, too, but I would have had to spend another $80 because all that software and its license was saved -- let's see -- two hard drives ago.

Turns out it was just a bad USB connection. It behaved admirably once I bypassed the USB hub and plugged it directly into my laptop. But I was still shaky all afternoon.

Did I mention that after the disk crash on my latest computer, it only took a few weeks for some files to become corrupted and render my computer un-bootable? Yup. The files couldn't be repaired. Had to re-load everything.

Mr. S. Moosebutt claims that he can hear the PDA's screaming in pain as I walk past them in the university bookstore. He should know -- he's accompanied me for most of the "replace the PDA" runs I've had to make over the past few years. Although the Dell Axim performed well right up until two weeks after the one-year warranty expired, I find that Palm PDAs are good for an average of two repairs during their one year period of functionality. (Hint: always send the Palm PDAs to the repair center Registered Mail. One of mine was lost in transit, and never got the chance to die 10 days after the warranty expired. Sad, in a way. Moosebutt's theory is that it escaped from the truck somewhere near Tucson, and is living in sin with one of my old digital watches. They are currently plotting my death.)

This is a Palm pretending to have just
died, so that I will not take it home.

I should have seen it all coming. It wasn't too long ago that my watch was trying to escape. I had a metal watchband, held together by metal rods. To get a connecting rod out, you had to push really hard with a small pin or something. But routinely, as I would walk across campus, a rod would fall out and my watch would fall off.



I'm on my second watchband now. Its latch quit closing tight, but so far no escapes. Maybe when I turned fifty, Ralph lost a little mojo.

I'm holding my breath now, because I bought a new Blackberry and I really like it. It does everything I ask of it (except sync with Outlook using the Toshiba Bluetooth stack instead of the Windows Bluetooth stack -- Thanks, Blackberry folks!) and hasn't tried to escape even once. I'm cautiously optimistic, but do me one favor. If you see me walking across campus with my laptop case, please don't do anything to make Ralph angry.