What a weird day I’ve had. The weirdness of my day actually stems back to the start of this week when I came into work and found my 20" Apple Cinema display was on the fritz. The top of the screen was kinda grey while the bottom still appeared to be fine. The light on the front was blinking in a pattern every 15 seconds or so. Upon a little bit of interweb sleuthing I discovered that the blinking light pattern translated into "my backlight is pooched, take me in for service!" on one of the Apple service pages. So I told Wendy, who’s the one who deals with these kinds of issues in my department, that it needed to be serviced. After a little pow-wow with the higher powers, it was decided that they would buy me a new Cinema display and get my monitor fixed. I also got razzed a bit about the fact that I’m a monitor killer, this being the 3rd monitor I’ve done in since starting there 4 years ago. Our monitor situation around work has gotten a little tight since I’ve killed 3 monitors, so I told Wendy I would hang tight with my half illuminated display until she could get a new one ordered. Then ensued a couple of days where I went bug-eyed trying to judge colours properly on this monitor in the absence of a viable replacement. Wednesday rolls around and Wendy tells me that the place we order from has a monitor in stock for us, the only problem is there is no one available to go pick it up because a couple people were going to be away on Thursday. I was really anxious to get rid of this monitor that had been making me bug-eyed for 3 days, so I volunteered to go pick it up. Now the benefit to me was 3-fold, one I get a new monitor, two I get to go during office hours and get payed for it, which was a real added bonus as I rarely, if ever, get to leave the office for anything and three I had never been to this Apple shop before, so I wanted to check it out.

So that gets me caught up to the events of today. I wakeup this morning to find it had snowed, which wasn’t very cool. The roads were rather crummy on the drive in, but I figured the roads would clear by the time I had to leave to pickup the monitor. Around the time I left, around 11, the snow had eased off and according to the Weather Network we were only supposed to get 2-3cm of snow, so I thought the worst had passed. Fat chance. By the time I got on my way to Brantford it had started to virtually blizzard. I considered turning back, but I was already over halfway there and didn’t want to go through the process of re-setting up my busted monitor just so I could work again, so stubborn as I am, I soldiered on.

The place I was going to was on the Six Nations Indian reserve, which is a neck of the woods I’m not too familiar with, so I managed to get lost on the way. By the time it was all said and done it took me over an hour to get to this place. On a good clear day would probably take about 30 minutes. The store is actually in a log cabin and was kinda ghetto like, but had all the latest stuff so I could deal with it. It took all of 20 minutes to get the repair sorted out and walk out with my new display. On the way back from the reserve the weather took another turn for the worse after clearing for a bit. After having no incidents on the way there I had 2 close calls on the way back. The first resulted in me skidding out on one of the wind-y roads on the reserve and somehow not hitting anything. I was definitely waiting for the crunch of a smashed mailbox to happen. The second incident happened as I was almost back to the office.  I came over a bridge and found there was no traction whatsoever as I came down the incline towards a red light.  I locked the brakes and ended up sliding hard sideways into the curb. After inspecting my car afterwards there didn’t seem to be any cosmetic damage and the alignment still seemed alright, so I may have been lucky.

After all this ordeal I finally get back to the office and set up the monitor, only to find that the connector didn’t fit into the back of my computer. We took a look around and didn’t find anything among the hoards of adapters and converters that would work to hook it up. So after all that I had to swap monitors with someone else and essentially got the same display I had been using. I was mightily pissed. I never get anything new at work. I’m always on the lower end of the upgrade scale at work, so most of the equipment I get to use is at least second-hand. Finally I get something new bought for me and it doesn’t work. What a kick in the junk.

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