Good Days, Bad Days: Part Three: Bad Day

Well, as there are very good days, there are very bad days as well.

Last Wednesday was a terrible, terrible day for me:

1: My laptop suddenly stopped functioning. It died all of a sudden. The tech-support at Case told me that the motherboard needs to be replaced. My laptop is past guarantee period.

2: I was totally upset with that news, and at the same time, I was trying to set up a new protocol for my new set of experiments. It turned out to be way more complicated than I thought. It took my almost half a day.

3: I wanted to send the protocol to my supervisor, so I was composing an email. I got bored, so thought of saving the mail. My first draft is always very messy, it has many short-forms, has tons of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Anyone reading it would find it very disgusting.

Well, instead of clicking the "Save" button, I clicked the "Send" button !!. It was a "mistake" !!. Dam*It !

4: So there was a need of face-saving act. I completed the e-mail, spell-checked it, corrected all formatting issues, wrote a short note explaining the circumstances of previous crap. I thought I should CC that mail to myself (I have this habit of CCing important mails to myself. Dont ask me why. Gmail has unlimited space, so who cares)

Well, instead of sending it to myself, I sent it to the other Vivek (W). I had to send couple of more emails to my supervisor and to Vivek explaining the circumstances. My reputation was seriously at stake.

5: If all this mess was not enough for the day, I broke my MP3 player in the evening.

I was working out on the rowing machine in the gym, something happened, and the next thing I saw was that my MP3 player was lying 3 feet away from me, wide open and dismantled.. Now, I have to hold it up using a band-aid !!!


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I just didn't imagine that a day could be so bad. My laptop was very dear to me. The circumstances under which I bought it, the kind of pain (Literally. It weighed almost 9 Lbs with accessories. It almost broke my shoulder one day. But I had this sense of belonging to my laptop, and I would enjoy that pain. Because it was MY laptop) I went thru, some of the unforgettable moments I had with my laptop, and all those Seinfeld memories made it much more valuable than its mere monetary value. I dont think I am going to put a new motherboard in it, as the hardware + equipment cost would be more than its present value.

I am not much worried about money factor (My policy: Money comes, and goes. One should not care too much about the things that are not in our control). Its just that I am feeling a huge void in my life since Wednesday.

I was so used to having a laptop at my disposal all the time. First thing I would do after waking up was switching on the laptop and check news / mail. And same before sleeping. Now every morning and nite seems very strange. I just wake up, take bath, and drive to work.

And same happens at work as well. I used to take my laptop to work everyday, and everyone just assumed that I would use it for daily work. Now, I dont have a computer for me, and have to depend on others' to do simple things like check mails or print a document.

It just feels different. I guess I will get used to it, and will start spending more time with my image-analysis Linux box. Some of my personal things are very dear to me, and my laptop was one of them.

................

May be its a good thing to happen to me. With qualifiers coming up in a month's time, I guess it would do me a world of good to stay away from Email-Gmail as much as I can.

Its said that whatever happens, happens for good: I dont know if that's always true, but I guess it helps a lot if we think about it in that spirit. Things become easier to digest. What say?