Livin' on a Prayer

I had two brushes with technological disaster in the past 48 hours.

First story: I sitting in small group yesterday, and was just opening up my notes on my laptop. "Where's that crazy buzzing sound coming from," I asked myself; "How are we supposed to work with kind of noise in the building?" I then noted that my computer was vibrating quite strongly, and that it had actually hung. At that point, I realized that the source of the incredibly disturbing noise and vibration was not construction, but my computer, notably my hard drive. Not good! Rebooting resulted in a few loud clunking noises, like a hammer being dropped onto a metal table. Later attempts resulted in a weird opening-and-closing metallic zipper sounds. I thought I was screwed; naturally, I don't have backups. Well, the happy ending to the story is that when I got home, and I tried again, it just sat there for 15 seconds, then booted up as if nothing had happened. I ran off to buy a spare hard drive, and backed up all my files. Phew. Everything's going to be o-kay.

My other mini-story occured the night before. I got home, after a long day at school, and went to try and wash the formalin smell off of my hands. I turned on the bathroom light, and was greeted with the flash of a bulb burning out. No probs. I had a low-wattage flourescent bulb that I had wanted to install anyways. I screwed out the old bulb, and put in the new bulb. I hit the light switch. Boom! There were some big sparks out of the light fixture, and part of the fixture fell out of the ceiling, smashing the bulb into a million tiny shards on my bathroom floor. Examining it later, there must have been a short circuit inside the thing that you screw the bulb into; it had blown its ceramic shell into two parts, and parts of the metal around it had melted away. Excitement! The happy ending to this story? It forced me to clean my apartment, so that I wouldn't be embarrassed when the landlord came by to fix the fixture. Spotless!