As I mentioned previously the harddrive in my powerbook failed a few weeks ago. It has since been repaired and returned to me. I’ve come to think of the three (yes, three!) weeks between it dying and it being restored as the “dark times”.
It all started badly. I had been procrastinating heavily on a term paper for a course I took last term (of the four of us in it, only one person actually turned in the report before mid January. Ah, the joys of gradschool and easygoing professors). It was Sunday afternoon and I had decided it was finally time to bite the bullet and finish this thing. I’d got about as far opening the word processor when I sensed something was amiss. Symptoms of general amiss-ness included programs freezing for several seconds of time and an angry buzzing noise emanating from the hard-drive region. I quickly plugged in my USB stick and copied my term paper and associated files onto it. Pretty soon the computer had totally frozen. I tried rebooting but it refused.
Next day I phoned Applecare and they walked me through a hardware test which reported something along the lines of “OMG WTF TEH HARDDRIVE IS TOAST!!”
I was feeling a bit dazed at this point. The thing that prevented me from feeling completely panicked was the knowledge that I had pretty recent backups of all my stuff.
I took the powerbook to a local Compusmart that has an apple service tech on staff. I walked through the door, shook the snow off jacket and made my way towards the service counter.
“Can I help you?” asked a salesman.
“I’ve got a powerbook that needs servicing” I said.
“This gentleman over here can help you” he said gesturing to my right. At this point, dear reader, you should make note of the fact that when I am feeling stressed I am prone to sudden abrupt movements.
I spun around and punched the certified apple repair technician squarely in the stomach.
“Oh dear!” I cried. I apologized loudly, to him, to his coworkers, to the entire store.
“It’s fine” he said.
“If he’s still standing you didn’t hit him hard enough” called one of his coworkers from somewhere in the aisles.
I handed over the laptop and he assured me it would only take a few days to order the new part and put it in.
Two days later he phoned to tell me that my warranty was non-existent. “Call up Apple” he said. He seemed to sense my gentle nature and down-trodden mood. He added, “be stern with them”.
I called up Apple. Several times over several days. I got to know the Applecare technically support line very well. Turned out that since more than a year had passed since I’d bought the thing, and since I’d *ahem* neglected to mail in the form that came with my extended warranty, they’d decided I in fact, did not *have* an extended warranty.
Miraculously, my mother was able to dig through my parents’ basement and turn up the original receipt from the shop where we ordered the machine, demonstrating that I had in fact paid for an extended warranty. She faxed this to Apple. Thanks mom.
Apple was actually quite good about the situation, considering. My only real complaint is that the time interval between when they got the fax and when they actually agreed that the powerbook was still under warranty was rather long.
The day after the warranty business Jamie phoned to see how I was doing without the internet. “I just finished rearranging all the furniture in my apartment!” I said. We talked for a while. He read me some websites over the phone (“IP over Telephony!”). Thank for checking up on me Jamie.
The following sunday I managed to get my linux box up and running again. The week without internet (except for brief periods at school) actually wasn’t all that bad. I listened to cbc a lot (and won a contest as a result), read a few novels and went to bed at a reasonable hour. The main downside was the inability to charge my iPod due to lack of working usb ports.
After that there was a lot of boring waiting and putting up with linux. I finally got the powerbook back last Tuesday. It took a couple days to gather up my backups and whatnot (Senuti is a handy program if ever you find yourself wanting to copy your music collection off you iPod instead of having to rip all those CDs over again).
Life is getting back to normal.
Oh, and as a general word of advice: right now is a very good time to back up your data.