This is just weird. We just a few days ago got back from a glorious three weeks in Hawaii and the last two days have been extraordinarily difficult, with tons of things going wrong.
Just before we left, I bought a new Apple MacBook Pro laptop, and wouldn’t you know it, the power button’s now akilter, the trackpad button is acting flakey, and today suddenly the battery just vanished from the computer. Literally, one moment I’m running along writing an email and everything’s going great, then blamo! the computer’s shut down. I can see that the battery is 50% charged, but the computer can’t see it at all.
Fortunately, I called Apple on their ever-helpful 800-SOS-APPL line, and it’s a known problem with these MacBook Pro batteries: a new one’s already on the way to me. I won’t have it for my trip to Chicago on Thursday, which is a huge drag, but at least the laptop works just fine when it’s plugged into the wall.
That’s the first problem we had…
My second hassle: I bought a couple of iPod Shuffles from the Apple Store as giveaways at my talk in Chicago on work/life balance. They were refurbs and a phenomenal deal at only $45/unit. I bought three, but not before carefully reading that refurbs are shipped in the original product packaging.
Well, they aren’t. I have three shuffles in big cardboard boxes emblazoned with “REFURBISHED UNIT”. I can’t give those away!
So another call to Apple, this time to authorize a return. No problem at all, which is nice, but now I have to go out to a store and buy them, rather than save one bit of hassle before my trip.
What else happened today? Oh, G-, our 7yo, came home from school early because he felt sick. Basically, it’s the timezone problem: shifting back from Hawaii time to Colorado time is a big four hour different and the first night we were home everyone just zonked out because we were exhausted after our redeye from Kona (blech). Last night, though, the four hour change was just enough to affect everyone and the older kids didn’t get to sleep until about 10, 10:30pm.
Today we woke ’em up as usual, 7.30am, to get to school and at 10am, while I’m in my office downtown and don’t have a car (I take the bus), school calls and I need to come pick up the little nipper. So I get on the bus to get him and part-way there, Linda calls. She can take care of things. Great, so now I’ve lost 45 minutes and am worried for naught.
Then he gets home, lays low for a while, and is fine. Tonight he’s looking tired, but no worse for wear, just ready to get recalibrated and back into a regular sleep pattern.
I could also talk about my hour spent trying to get to the right people at United Airlines to apply for a platinum signature credit card through them (to get some miles for a fairly high-ticket transaction we’re doing later this month), but I won’t. Too frustrating! Oh my gosh, though, you wonder some times how much companies really want your business. I mean, I have good friends that are Indian, and I am infatuated with the culture and movies, but when they’re all just roadblocks stuck in a call center, it’s infuriating!
Anyway, at least things are settling down. Hawaii was truly splendid, by the way. Here’s a nice pic for you to enjoy:
I’ll write more about why we love Hawaii and what we did for three weeks! soon. Today, I just want to vent about the $#@$$# stuff that happened.
Ya ever just have one of those days?