Gremlins

“If it ain’t one thing, it’s another!” (I tried to find out who said that first, but I see it attributed all over the place. My favorites are from fictional characters Rosanne Rosannadanna and “Buckaroo Banzai”‘s Rawhide, so we’ll go with them.)

I like computers and electronics and music and video and ebook readers and cell phones and iPads and so on. I like them a lot. It’s great to have more computing power and memory and utility in my pockets and on my wrist and in my briefcase than the entire planet had when I was born. (More or less.)

But it’s a pain when they break, and they always seem to break in bunches. I always thought it was coincidence, but a friend once told me it was gremlins and I’m starting to believe it.

Simple things, like the waterproof, Bluetooth speaker for the shower that connects to my iPhone. It works like a charm for a month or three. It’s great to have some excellent tunes in the shower every morning. Then it just dies. No dead batteries, no error messages, it didn’t get dropped, it didn’t get smashed, it just stopped working. What a pain!

The cable’s been acting flaky and getting worse for weeks. It seems heat related, gets better at night, gets worse during the day, gets much worse on hot days. But all the TV’s at one end of the house are fine, all the TV’s at the other end of the house are flaky. Certain channels drop out, certain channels are fine. Internet is fine coming through the same connection. So what gives?

A desktop computer that’s one of my primary ones has been working fine for six or seven years. Today, no warning, no magic blue smoke, no nothing. It just won’t turn on. What a big pain!

I realize that all of these are “first world problems”. But I live here in the first world!

So tomorrow I’ll attack back – best defense is a good offense and all of that. I have multiple computers and the one that’s died almost certainly just blew a power supply, which I can replace in an hour or so. The cable probably has an amp or switch that’s feeding half the house and it’s gone bad, so I can track it down, crawl under the house if I really have to, and replace it. I don’t know what to do about the stupid shower speaker thing, but I’ll figure out something.

Once I get all of that taken care of, maybe I can tackle the car problems. On the other hand, most of the problems with my car are due to the fact that it’s twelve years old and has over 165,000 miles on it, so maybe shopping for a new one would be a better use of my time.