system failure.

There's a particular kind of sinking feeling that comes when your computer dies.  Sometimes it's a slow build, the gradual recognition that a particular noise or behavioral quirk is actually a sign that something's wrong.  In this particular case, there was no such ambiguity.  Saturday morning, bright and early, I sat down with a cup of coffee to check my email and start my weekly computer maintenance routine (backing up my documents, checking for software updates, cleaning the desktop clutter, that kind of thing).   There I was, paging through the new email, when it happened.  The cursor froze and a dense network of tiny parallel lines covered the now-flickering screen.  No warning, no early signs of trouble or strange noises or triggering events.  One minute, everything's fine, and the next minute my computer is dead.  Rebooting didn't help--the lines and the flickering persisted, and it hung on the loading screen--so I resigned myself to spending my morning (or possibly my whole day) at the Apple store.

As it turned out, I was able to get my computer looked at after only waiting in store for an hour and a half (the appointment queues for the Genius Bar are insane, but they do have a standby list), and the guy who helped me was friendly and competent.  If you're ever in the Bay Area and need to deal with the Apple support people, I strongly suggest going to the San Francisco store instead of the Emeryville one.  Even leaving out of consideration the long saga of problems I've had with Genius Bar techs at Emeryville, there's the plain fact that the San Francisco store has a place for you to sit while you wait for your appointment, while the Emeryville store doesn't.

Once I finally got seen by a tech person, the news was, well, not good, but much better than it could have been.  He ruled out a software-based origin to the problem, and he confirmed that my hard drive is healthy and my data intact.  The computer is being shipped off to a repair center, and I should have it back by the middle or end of next week.  It could have been a lot worse, and it could have been a lot more expensive.

That said, I'm still without a computer for possibly up to a week.  I'm using Matt's old laptop, so I have access to email and websites, but I don't have any of my files, and my whole workflow process has been (obviously) disrupted, so if you're expecting email or work from me this week, I may need a few extra days and some extra prompting.  On the silver-lining side, I guess this is as good a time as any to really focus on work that doesn't need the computer!  Sigh. 

Comments

[David Moles]

Oy. You have some of the worst computer luck. :(

[Jed]

:( Meant to drop you a note the other day saying sorry to hear this.

I continue to be surprised at how often your Macs self-destruct. I wonder if there's some kind of anti-Mac field around your apartment or something....

And I continue to feel that Apple ought to provide a loaner-laptop program for people who need to send their computers in for repair. I imagine they've determined that it wouldn't be a good idea for some reason (maybe because it would encourage people to send in their computers for repair of minor issues?), but it sure would be useful.

Anyway. Hope it comes back soon, fully fixed.

[Jackie M.]

I know! Susan's Mac in particular. (Susan, are you sure you're not sleepwalking and doing strange things to your computer in the middle of the night? Like sticking it in the freezer for an hour? Or pouring milk into the CDROM drive?)

I actually do have some funky electrical issues in my office at work--I've got a RAID 5 setup and an uninterruptable power supply AND an automatic external backup every night. And it's a good thing, too, because I'm still going through 1/2 TB hard drives at the rate of about one every 3 months. Which is about the rate that the dude before me was going through them--there's something decidedly unhappy about the wiring in that office.

[Susan Marie Groppi]

Setting aside ridiculous examples, every time I bring the computer in for repairs, I ask them if there's anything I'm doing that could be causing it to have so many problems. They say no, it's just that laptops are relatively fragile pieces of machinery. It does seem like a lot of bad luck, though.

That said, the computer is right this minute on a FedEx truck, making its happy way back to my house. This was a really fast repair-and-return process, which goes a long way towards restoring my good feelings for Apple.