Finagle's law

Wow, I can't believe I haven't been on here for almost 2 months. Well if what has occurred over the last week or so is any indication of how my life has been going the past 2 months, I think you'll understand.

Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives (also known as Finagle's corollary to Murphy's Law) is usually rendered:

Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment

Well isn't that the damn truth. They say things happen in 3's so I guess it is a good sign that I got 3 or 4 out of the way before I have to get on a plane tomorrow.

Let's see ... where do I begin. I guess it all started Wednesday, October 25th. I'm driving home and realize that I have some fuzz on me, instead of just throwing it on the floor which I will have to vacuum up later, I decide to roll down the window and just throw out a little fuzz. My window is making a weird noise, but I figure maybe it is just frozen so I continue to press the down button and the window eventually goes down about halfway so I can dispose of the fuzz or hair or whatever the hell it was. Since it is the end of October in Chicago and cold outside, I proceed to roll up my window, but nothing. Luckily I was only a couple of blocks from home and in bumper to bumper traffic so my speed wasn't making me too cold. I figured no big deal, it is probably just a fuse (I have a couple spares in my glove box) and I will change it once I get home. So I get home and of course all of my other windows work and it is just the driver's side window. I call my dad in a panic. 1. I can't leave my car parked on the street in Chicago with the window rolled halway down. 2. Its too cold to have to drive with the window down. Unfortunately my dad had no quick fix. He assumed that the window was out of the track and that the door needed to be taken apart and the window put back in place. He did say that if I drove my car home to their house, he would let me use his and they would bring the car into the shop for me.

Let me just say that I was looking forward to a fun night since I had just bought the latest Sims 2 expansion pack, but now I got to run upstairs, change, bundle up, and drive 35 miles to my parent's house with a window rolled halfway down. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. With the heat blasting, it was bearable.

So I get the car back $260 later and then I realize that now my driver's side mirror won't go up or down, it goes left and right, but not up and down. Of course the passenger mirror works fine. Not too big of a deal, but just gives you an idea of how anything that can go wrong, will.

Fast forward to Monday, November 6th. Before I leave for work, I get the bright idea to run a disk defrag on my laptop. I'm thinking it will help speed things up and why not have my laptop do the work while I'm at work. I get home to hear an aweful noise coming from my laptop. Now my fan is usually loud, but this was a different louder noise. So I walk up to the laptop to find an error:

Intel (R) Boot Agent Version 4.1.08
Copyright (C) 1997-2002, Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating System not found.

Operating system not found?!?! WTF!

So I shut down the laptop and boot it back up and it seems to be working properly. So I pack everything up and drove down to my parent's house. I took a personal day so I could go down to my parent's house and vote, and go to the dentist.

When I get to my parent's the computer will not boot up. I tried it 2 or 3 times and nothing, so I went on my dad's desktop and chatted with a tech from gateway. Of course my warranty had expired, but gateway will still let you chat with a tech for free. Of course when I'm online with gateway, my computer boots up. So they suggest that I run a scan disc. So I start the scan disc and decide to go to sleep.

I wake up on Tuesday morning, all excited to vote and what do I see:

Intel (R) Boot Agent Version 4.1.08
Copyright (C) 1997-2002, Intel Corporation
PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable
PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent
Operating System not found.

My dad had already seen it when he woke up and knew I wouldn't be happy. Of course the computer didn't boot up right away, but when it finally did I asked my brother if I could use his dual layer dvd burner so I could backup my hard drive. He said sure so I hooked it up and started the backup process. About 3/4 of the way thru, I got the same error and then, I couldn't get the hard drive to boot up at all.

I was now in a panic. I hadn't backed up my hard drive since May and I know there are tons of files on here that I have created since then. I chat with Gateway and they say I can send in the hard drive for $299.

$299 WTF?!? I already just spent $260 on my car, I don't have another $299 for my laptop. So I do what everyone does when they have computer problems, sent an email and asked everybody I know if they have a solution. Luckily a friend of mine is a computer tech and he said he could borrow a part from work where he could hook up my laptop hard drive to his desktop and then try to copy the files onto my external hard drive. He told me he could do it on Friday night so I said I would come by after work.

But first, I have a training session in Washington DC on Monday and Tuesday. When I checked for flights it was actually cheaper to fly into New York City on Friday night as opposed to flying into DC on Sunday night. A friend of mine lives in NYC and I have never been there and since the flight was cheaper, my boss okayed it for me to fly into NYC and then just rent a car to DC for the training session.

Tuesday night while I'm watching Nip/Tuck, my friend (who lives in NYC) calls and says that her dad is in the hospital. He has heart problems and was in the hospital right before Halloween. She tells me that she doesn't think it is a good time for me to come and visit. So I'm like great, I'm really sorry to hear about your dad, but now I have to try to find a hotel or something.

I decide screw it and I got into work early on Wednesday and changed my flight to fly into DC late Sunday night. That way I didn't have to spend god only knows how much money on a hotel, rent a car, and then have to drive the 4 hours to DC. Crisis averted. I get home from work and of course I started developing a sore throat on Wednesday night. I figure I will just take a couple of doses of echinachea and be better before I know it.

I come home from work on Thursday and realize that my Internet, phone, and cable are all out. I call up RCN and they say the soonest they can get somebody out here is Tuesday. WHAT!?! I have to be without a phone, internet, and TV for 5 days? That is unacceptable. I decide to try to trouble shoot the problem myself with no help of course, so now I call RCN back and get a friendly guy on the phone who tries to do some troubleshooting on his own, but comes to the realization that I need a tech to come out. He says he will schedule me for Tuesday and then put in an emergency request to my local RCN to get someone out sooner.

I woke up yesterday with a horrible sore throat and said screw it, I'm calling in sick. That way I won't get anybody else sick, can try to get the cable fixed, and now have a good excuse for changing my flight.

I call RCN once again in the morning to find out how I can get in contact with my local RCN to get someone out sooner and a not so nice lady tells me that all tech appointments are scheduled through where I was already calling and Tuesday was the first available. So I asked her if I could just cancel my service with them since I could probably call Comcast (their competitor) and get new service sooner (of course I called Comcast and they wouldn't be able to come out until Tuesday too). She tells me I have to call customer service for that and I ask for the number and she says they will be in in about an hour.

Now since I am feeling even sicker, I decide to go back to sleep. When I woke up, I called customer service and told them the situation and that I wanted to cancel my service. Of course they were soooooooo sorry and would contact a tech and call me back within 45 minutes. She called back in 15 minutes and said she could have someone come out between 2 and 5pm. I was so grateful and a little annoyed that customer service can do what tech support can't.

So 5pm rolls around and I get a call from the tech saying he is running around 20 minutes late. Great, I thought I would be able to get out of here early and head towards my parent's house so my friend could backup my laptop, but no luck there.

The tech finally arrives at 6pm and of course it is raining. Since my phone doesn't work, I get to run downstairs and out to the gate everytime he comes because I can't buzz him in without a phone. He goes to the back to see if the cable is disconnected from the outside. Then puts a little box in my apt to find the right connection. No luck so we have to go to the basement. He asks if he can come back tomorrow and I was like, I would prefer to get this taken care of tonight because I have alot of running around to do on Saturday and not only do I not have a phone, cable, or internet, but my alarm system works through the phone system so now I'm unsecure. He is annoyed because it is late, rainy and cold outside, but I'm sorry. After playing around in the basement and outside, he comes back in about a quarter to 8pm and says that the signal coming into my apt is too strong and that is why my box can't read the signal. (It sounded like a bunch of BS to me) I asked how something like that could happen and he said he couldn't answer that. He said someone from RCN would have to come out to take a look at it. When I asked when that could happen of course he couldn't say.

So now its 8pm, I still have no tv, phone, internet, or alarm system and I have to drive the 35+ miles to get to my friend who is gracious enough to help me backup my laptop. He works his magic and his scan disc is able to fix the errors on my hard drive and we copy all of my documents onto my external hard drive. Unfortunately I had more files than I thought and the copying finally gets done around 12:30 - 1am. I can't thank him enough since I thought I was going to lose it if I lost all of the files on my hard drive.

So I then went to my parent's house because my mom had some echinachea for me and I decided to just drive back home since I was feeling the allergic affects of my friends 2 cats along with my cold/flu. So I grabbed a pepsi and drove back into the city. I finally got home and decided to run a scan disc on my hard drive just to test it out and finally got to bed around 3am.

Unfortunately I woke up at 9am, but at least the laptop is still working. I called RCN because I wanted to see if there really was such a thing as having too strong of a signal and after being on hold for 25 minutes, the tech support came on the line and said that there was a request for someone to come out and do a survey to find out what the problem was but that could take 3 to 5 days. Perfect, so now I can be without all services for about a week. I ask to talk to customer service and of course they are only there Monday thru Friday 9 to 5.

So that is where I am at people. Luckily before the tech guy left yesterday he plugged the cable directly into the back of my tv so I'm circumventing the cable box. So I get some TV, but the reception sucks and no premium channels. I am lucky enough to live in a building where someone doesn't know that your suppose to secure your wireless network. In other words, I'm stealing someone else's internet access. I guess I should be happy that it is at least the weekend so I get unlimited minutes on my cell. (See I'm trying to look on the bright side)

Well I think I'm going to take a nap and then I have to drive into the office because I didn't plan on calling on sick on Friday and I have my flight and hotel information in my desk. I'm thinking it is best to get that before I have to head to the airport Sunday night.

I hope everyone else is having a better week/weekend than I am.

Sorry for this bitchfest, but I needed to vent and figured this was the best place to do it. I promise my next update won't take 2 months to get and it will be a little more upbeat.