The Little Black Cloud strikes again

Some of you who know me well know there's a Little Black Cloud that follows me around raining annoying bad luck down upon my life. It's usually highly annoying things, sometimes catastrophic things, and these things don't seem to happen to other people. And they usually come in groups. Many of them are of my own doing, though certainly not consciously.

Like the time that I "struck down, with fierce vengeance," a pair of hapless and unwitting sunglasses.

While heading to Philly to do some work, I threw my bags into the back of an SUV, closed the tailgate and climbed into the front passenger seat. The "tailgate is a jar" light was on (and I always thought it was just a door ;-), so I hopped out to make sure that I'd closed the door tightly enough.

I opened and closed it again and still the light burned. I opened and slammed it a good one. The light shown challengingly. I realized that there must be something stuck in the door, keeping it open.

When I investigated I found the neoprene case of my $150 sunglasses hanging from my bag, right in line with the lip of the door frame. Yikes.

I lost it. I came unglued -- with laughter.

You see, these kinds of things happen to me (or I do them to myself) fairly often, and I just have to laugh them off. I have to. Or I'd go postal.

I detached the glass case from my bag, ignoring for the moment the questions from within the SUV of "What? What's so funny?" and closed the door like a normal person. The light winked out. I think it might have flickered laughingly.

I climbed back into the front seat, still giggling to myself. I told my companions that I'd found what was blocking the door. For comedic effect, I slowly poured the tiny bits of pulverized sunglasses into my hand. More laughter, this time from them.

Then there was the time I was in San Diego to do some work for ARJIS, and my laptop decided to quit. I opened an image from my digital camera and the computer froze. When I turned it off and on, it didn't recognize the hard disk. All from looking at a picture on the PC. Like thst's so dangerous to do. And like nobody else ever looks at their digi-cam shots on their computer. However, only I can trash a hard drive doing it. Only me, baby. Go figure.

Sadly, I needed that laptop to do the work I was in San Diego to do. It was almost a disaster. That time the LBC wasn't funny. I was supposed to be at the customer site the following Tuesday, and, it then being Sunday afternoon, I didn't see any pleasant solutions.

Luckily, on Monday, we found a local PC repair store that allowed us to reinstall XP on the machine (apparently this problem isn't uncommon and the folks at the store knew how to fix it - just reinstall XP. It doesn't even overwrite your previous configuration). Eventually, all was well, though I was certainly worse for the wear and tear on my psyche.

That wasn't all, though. I was staying with family in Murrieta and Monday night I headed to SD. When I got there and got my stuff out of the rental I found that I'd left my business clothes in Murrieta, hanging in my room, an hour and a half away. Time to shop -- at 8:30 in the evening, with the stores close at 9:00. I headed to Nordy's at Horton's Plaza. I knew fro their world-class reputation for services that they wouldn't kick me out promptly at sharp.

I was right. They kicked my out at 9:05, sharp. Not! Kiddking! Actually, they were very kind and very helpful.

So, when I got to the customer site, there was still more from the LBC. We (they) had terrible network problems the whole time I was there. See? There's always more.

Well, the LBC struck again last night. It came again into my life, bringing its calamitous rain and its ill wind.

Last night, the very same laptop that was with me in SD, decided to die permanently and horribly, complete with grinding sounds from the hard disk. It was ugly. Very ugly.

But, as is usually the case, these rain storms are like Ginzu knife commercials: "Wait! There's more!"

At about this same time, I was installing RedHat Linux Fedora Core 3 on my desktop machine. I wanted to be able to dual-boot it into both Linux and Windows XP. Everything seemed to go well, until the moment of truth, when I rebooted the machine: Linux wouldn't boot. Figgers.

Oh well, no big deal. Just a little lost time while I figure out why. So, I rebooted again and selected XP to load. It started out ok, then it, too, died.

So, I says to myself, I says:

"Oh. Dammit (or maybe it was something more colorful). That's not good.

"Well, at least I have Windows 98 SE. I didn't do anything to that installation. I'll boot it and fix the other two from there."

(Fwiw, I wasn't talking to myself. I was talking to Spaz, who was snoozing disinterestedly behind me)

Like I said: "Wait! There's more!" There always is.

I reset the machine, chose Windows 98 to load and it started out OK... Then Windows 98 died.

"SHIT," I says (or maybe it was something more colorful).

Now I'm starting to worry a bit.

While all of this was happening, the laptop, sitting quietly in it's docking station, started being not-so-quiet. So I undocked it and booted it. The screen just said: "No hard disk or optical drives found." Oh-oh.

So, I booted it from a disk of recovery software, which started up just fine. I told the software to fix the disk. This went OK for about five minutes, then the noises got worse and finally, the grinding ground into stillness. Quiet. An ominous hush. No sounds except for the whir of the little fans inside the laptop.

I think I again said, "SHIT!" (or maybe it was something more colorful).

So, there I sat, with no working computers in the house (my original Linux box had died a couple of months ago). I'm starting to feel withdrawal symptoms. No web. No email. No IM. No Python. No Java. No Eclipse. NO C-O-M-P-U-T-E-R-S!!! Aaaaaagh!

I started trying to recover the Windows 98 and Windows XP installations. I also run some diagnostic tests on the laptop.

"Wait! There's more!'

I needed to be able to boot to some utilities on a floppy, so I created a boot disk. I picked up my handy, dandy P-Touch label maker (one of those things that makes the little black-on-white plastic labels), punched in "Windows 98 Boot Disk," clicked Print and...

...the little machine ate the label. It whirred and clicked and made brave little printing sounds, but no label came out.

NOW it was time for the laughter. It finally occurred to me that the LBC was hard at work making fodder for my blog.

But, as I said: "Wait! There's more!"

Oh, yes. There's more. There always is.

This morning I called Dell about the laptop. The technician I spoke with started to complain about her system being slow. Still, we were able to muddle through the process and we almost completed the call. Almost. Just as we were about wrap up the call, she exclaimed:

"Oh, NO! My system just crashed!"

Oh, yes. Crashed. Done. Kapoot. Yeah, baby. The LBC can travel through the phone lines. Das whad I'm talkin' about!

I just laughed. Hard. I think this offended the technician. However, by the time I explained to her about the LBC, the glasses, and my prior evening, she was laughing, too. You just have to laugh.

Or you'd go postal.

The LBC is real. And it can reach through the telephone and destroy other peoples' lives who get embroiled in my embroglios [sic].

So, if I ever call you up to help me out of an unfortunate situation, you may want to think twice before agreeing. You might get rained on. In fact, you should probably just hang up on me. It would be safer for you if you did.