Digital Dramas

For the first time ever I think I have a really legitimate excuse for not blogging recently - there has been a cascade of electronic dramas in our household over the last few weeks.

First was the car. The Civic stopped working. I discovered this when I went down with my instructor to start my driving lesson. First I thought the central locking wasn't working, then I wondered why the light didn't come on when I opened the door, then when I turned the key in the ignition there was not even a click - luckily my instructor is flexible and Franni was across having breakfast in Naremburn and we walked over and I drove her little green frog car. We didn't call the NRMA immediately because neither of us had the time to drive the car for the hour or so it would need and after that, it got more complicated.

Next discovery was that the backup drive that I got before Christmas doesn't work. At all. I spent ages arsing around changing cables and testing on different computers to work that out. I was trying to back-up because I had (and still have) the feeling that my PC is going to die on me and, at best, will need a complete rebuild.

Then, maybe the next day, when I turned the computer on my fancy new Samsung screen didn't work. I got an error message so I didn't realise it was the screen that was the problem and again wasted several hours of my life trying to narrow down where the problem was. Unfortunately we have to send it back to Samsung rather than taking it into the shop where we got it, which is a huge f***ng pain. The screen took a freaking age to troubleshoot, because we have no spare screen I ended up having to try various cables and hook up the screen that Sanjay broke (in his fit of pique) to work out that it was, in fact, the screen itself (not the cable, graphics card, or whatever else).

Next were the phones - Sanjay's mobile decided it wasn't working, unless it was either in the car or on speakerphone. The keypad keeps falling off my phone. Then the final straw - our home phone stopped working, after a little troubleshooting we worked out that the problem was with the line - neither phone nor internet worked. We were officially incommunicado - we had to wait til Sanjay's phone randomly started working again to call and they said it was a line fault. Living for a week with no internet was horrible, like having a limb removed - we did get a few early nights though. Optus had to send out a technician, who spent about 6 seconds the other morning plugging a cable in the comms board back in. He said it was probably a Telstra technician 'accidentally' bumping it.

So, Sanjay's phone mysteriously fixed itself, we have Anil's screen, we are back online, I got the most vital photos backed up onto Sanjay's laptop while I get the backup drive sorted and Sanj called NRMA and got the car dealt with yesterday. And that is the saga. Hopefully I can now resume my normal, rather sporadic, blog posting schedule. A big thanks to Michael for coming around and helping us get some of the computer stuff a bit more sorted!