Adventures of a Freelancer

Last Wednesday I woke up to find that my shiny and reliable 12″ Powerbook had suffered something of a heart attack in the night. It was all seized up. It wouldn’t save. It just sat there, staring at me, mocking me, saying “No, Chris, you won’t be getting any work done today after all.”

So I brought it up to the Apple store. The nice guy with the beard there said they’d box it up and send it off for repair. Probably just needed a new Hard Drive, he said. These things happen, he said. Covered by my extended warranty he said.

So I shipped it off and took a forced vacation.

Or half a forced vacation, since the projects keep coming in hard and strong these days. All of a sudden I was a mercenary, hopping from friend’s machine to coffee house trying to get my logon fix. It was horrible, but I figured it would only last a few days and then the love of my computing life would be right back here with me. I could wait. I could handle it.

Then on Friday I got an email. The email said “Yo, Chris. We got your computer, but we gots an issue man. You gotta call us.”

Only not like that at all.

So I called up Apple.

And the nice folks at Apple (they really were very nice) said “Well, it looks to us like the problem has been caused by some sort of impact. There’s a dent. A dent we say. So we aren’t going to cover the repair.”

And I say “OK, sure, well, I don’t remember any dent, but if you say so. But how much will the repair be?”

And they say “Um. A bunch of money.”

So I say “Well, damn, I’m not going to pay a bunch of money to repair a 2.5 year old computer. Send it back.”

So I went up to the Apple store again, this time with my credit card clutched firmly in my hand and I dropped an even bigger amount of money on a shiny new macbook pro. It’s shiny. It’s new. I love it. I really didn’t want to have to buy it.

But anyway, I get my shiny new Macbook Pro home, I plug it into my backup Hard drive, I hit the restore button, I go get a drink of OJ and then I come back to find out that my restore has failed; that my backup is corrupted, and that all that data that I really, really do need, well, it just ain’t here.

And then I had a nervous breakdown.

And then I called my really mac savvy friends who helped me salvage at least a few recent and really important files.

And then I continued my nervous breakdown.

My old computer should be getting back here today. As soon as I get it, I’ll be searching for someone to help me scrape the data off its platter and get it back to me. I’m about 90 percent sure I’ll get everything back, but who knows how much it’s going to cost me.

Whew. It’s been exhausting. But I’m back to work. And hopefully it’s all going to be fine.

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