Fully Charged

I think I need to give myself at least 24 hours before I panic when little glitches in the system throw me for a loop.

Take this incident with the Dell power cord. Lizzie and I were getting ready to watch Charlie's Angels on my laptop. I plugged it in and heard a loud POP. Lizzie uncurled the cord and said something like, "Ew. There's a bare spot here."

Yeah, a bare spot, very small, on the cord, probably where Ishmael chewed it in one of his lonely furors. Never mind about that, time to watch silly women kicking hyperbolic butt. I loaded up the disc and then noticed that my computer was on battery.

Battery? What? That's when I discovered that the power cord wasn't working anymore.

Lizzie immediately spazzed, thinking that when she unkinked the power cord, she somehow obliterated it. No, there was that POP, it wasn't in my imagination. And the little AC adapter box had been operating hot for the last weeks. So I knew it was dead--but that didn't prevent me from plugging it into a variety of outlets, just to check.

I came downstairs with Lizzie's laptop and emailed Dave and Butch, freaking out about the possibility of dejuicing and having to share Lizzie's Mac for the duration.

Then I went online and figured out that I could probably get a replacement cord here, and have it delivered.

Sure enough, I called the first store I found that advertised one yesterday morning and sorted it all out. By 12:30, a man on a motorcycle putted up to the Balay Kalinaw with a load of adapters. The first one he tried showed that it was plugged in, but then an error message came up: the computer couldn't recognize it. Huh? And the battery, alas, would not be charging.

The man (turns out that his name was Arnold) popped out my battery and hooked it up again. Another, and immediate, error message.

Arnold managed to indicate to me that I should get the original adapter, which I'd left in the apartment, of course, 4 floors up. I ran upstairs and down again.

In the meantime, Arnold had hooked up another adapter--and this one worked. (After Arnold left and I'd walked-run to school for my classes, I discovered that he'd probably tried the wrong voltage on the first go round, because the old box had a label that said 18.5 V rather than the 19.5 I needed. It's nice to have an explanation, rather than the mystical idea that the laptop's "picky.")

So here I am, fully loaded, Friday morning, another crisis averted. If I hadn't gone off and emailed Dave and Butch, it might not even have been a blip on everyone else's radar. I feel a little silly after such mini meltdowns, as if I've run out of the house in my underwear.