Wading in the Velvet Sea

This all goes back to last Thursday, when a coworker suggests a few of us all go in on some MegaMillions tickets. The jackpot was something like $250 million, I think. I don’t know, since I don’t pay attention as a general rule to lottery prizes. Falls just below “the weather reports in Boston” on my attention scale. It’s not like either of them have any bearing on my reality, so why bother? But I thought my $5 donation to the pool couldn’t hurt that much, and there comes a moment in everyone’s life (or month, or week, or, hell, lunch break) when one looks at the cubicled life around them and thinks, “Yes, I very much wouldn’t mind not having to ever do this again.” So, five bucks went into the pot.

That night, The Girl and I took the train home together. Neither of us had had a particularly awesome week by any stretch of the definition of “awesome”, so we decided to get some wine for the night. I bought some white, she bought some red, and we went home to cook us some meatloaf. And by that, I mean to say she was going to cook meatloaf while I watched DVR’ed episode of “X-Play” and “Cash in the Attic” in the man room.

With me, in the man room, were my trusty MacBook and my trusty glass of wine. Both on the coffee table. There were on opposite ends of the table, but on the same table nonetheless. I mention these facts for a reason, and I’m sure you can guess the reason.

Long story short, in cleaning up the various DVDs, magazines, and games that had piled up in the room, I managed to hit the wine glass at the precise spot needed to inflict maximum shiraz damage to my DVDs, magazines, games, futon, and yea, my precious, precious MacBook.

Now, unlike another character who lost a precious, I didn’t merely scream “Looosssssst! Lossssssst!” I instead scream-spoke, for at least seven minutes, “F#ck me f#ck me f#ck me…” as we toweled off the MacBook. Wine was everywhere, splattered from a few feeet away, leaving at least half of the keyboard coated in the reddish-purple liquid. The bottom-right corner had also been splashed, leaving an effect not unlike a broken lava lamp to one’s eye: the depth of the screen finally revealed itself to me, layer after wine-stained layer, and let me tell you, I didn’t need a lesson in MacBook construction, particularly from a clumsily spilled glass of wine.

Needless to say, I flipped. Flipped hard. The poor Girl had to endure this mess of a man as he went through the five stages of grief in rapid succession, only to start right back at the beginning due to the sheer momentum of the mood swings. It was now 8:30ish, which meant the Apple stores would all be closing soon. Nothing to be done that night. And, after careful cleaning and testing, I found that that MacBook, against all odds, was still working. Only the bottom right hand corner betrayed any evidence that the by-product of fermented grapes had bitch-slapped this piece of electronic equipment just an hour earlier.

The plan was set in motion that The Girl would go to the Apple store in the morning, having made an appointment on the phone. I didn’t make the call since I was blubbering like a girl in the 80’s who found out they’d missed a Tiffany performance that day in the galleria. Bad times, people, bad times. Nothing to do but eat the meatloaf and drink, quite rapidly I might add, the rest of the wine.

So The Girl calls me at 10 am from the Apple store the following morning. Turns out the warranty I’d purchased, all $250 of it, naturally didn’t apply to this accident. Course it didn’t. That would only make sense. Now, if Osama Bin Laden had come over in the middle of the night, urinated upon it, set it on fire, and shoved the flaming, urine-ridden computer down my throat…well, it still wouldn’t have covered the damage, since liquid was at one point involved. The cost? $800, and it would take 3 weeks to return.

In the immortal words of Harriet Tubman, “Eff that.”

The computer itself cost $1,100. And would be ready, oh, right away. By this point, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that this little drop was going to cost me big time, and I wasn’t about to lose 3 weeks of myself just to save $300. So I ask Diana to pick up a new MacBook while there, and here’s my credit card number, and oh, the guy at the Genius bar (holy ironic naming, Batman, then again, who am I to judge, I'm the idiot who spilled wine on his favorite possession) says they won’t take my card over the phone, but we could always come in later, and they’d even sync up the Macs for me, and oh, sorry, I have to run, my new Birkenstocks that I ordered off eBay just showed up, I’ll be right back…and do I need to mention it’s a good thing I wasn’t in the store, for this a-hole’s physical well-being? No diggity. No doubt.

So, now we have ANOTHER appointment, this time at 7 pm on a Friday night, which is definitely the way we both envisioned kicking off the weekend. Now, the usual Ryan respond is the wail and moan (all internally, as my company has a strict “no wailing” policy) and scowl and get over it in, oh, 4 weeks. But I try to look upon this as a positive, or at the very least a “well, there’s nothing you can do about it now”. I go on my lunchbreak to the Apple Store in Cambridge (horrible Genius desk, but a fine enough sales department), and not only get a new MacBook, but an iPod and iPod shuffle for The Girl. Figure it would be a nice present, a thank you for putting up with me now and a preemptive “thank you” for all the times in the next 4 years I’ll make her wonder what the hell she’s doing with me (I’m banking on outright apathy after that to help her deal). I’ve dropped a ton of cash, but I have the means to pay for it. I’m annoyed I had to do it, but again, New Ryan is taking the positive view! New Ryan looks forward to surprising The Girl!

I take the train home as usual, having established with The Girl that she’d pick me up and we’d brave the rsuh hour traffic on Route 95 to get back to Burlington. Only she calls me as I’m on the train.

To tell me my car will no longer start.

New Ryan? Has left the building.

Here’s an example of the domino effect, y’all. Starting from the beginning.

Ryan spills wine. Ryan needs computer fixed. The Girl takes computer to store, during a driving rainstorm. The rain causes major puddles and minor flooding. The major puddles and minor flooding get into Ryan’s car. The Girl’s driving Ryan’s car because her car is STILL BURIED IN ICE due to the freak Valentine’s Day storm that dumped two inches of snow, two inches of sleet, two inches of rain, and then froze overnight as her car sat at the bottom of a hill in a part of the street in which the sun is blocked for the majority of the day by our apartment. The Girl pulls out of her parking spot in the mall, only to stall, sputter, and stop a third of the way out. The Girl calls AAA and waits twenty minutes as a good 20 cars drive up, think The Girl’s pulling out, stop, realize she’s not going anywhere, flip her off, and drive away. The Girl of course doesn’t tell Ryan any of this, lest he take a stapler from his desk and jam it directly into his eye, gets the jump from AAA, hopes all is well, until finding out as she tries to pick him up from the train station that the car is in fact dead.

Got all that?

So here’s the scene at 6 pm on Friday night: the new Apple goodies are on the steps of our apartment, my car’s dead to the world, and I’m on my hands and knees in a mixture of snow and ice trying to push The Girl’s car to freedom.

After forty-five minutes, absolutely nothing’s changed.

The new MacBook’s still in the box, my car won’t turn over, and The Girl’s car still resembles Haley Joel Osment’s character in “A.I.” after visiting Coney Island. Just a brutal Friday night.

Luckily, this story has a happy ending: we call AAA for both our cars first thing Saturday morning. I’d managed to get her car 90% of the way out of the ice, and the tow truck pulled it out the other 10%. As for my car: we thought it was a battery issue, which naturally would have cost me another $150-200, but luckily, this guy knew something about cars, and didn’t choose to use my ignorance against me. Turns out I have a faulty idle switch, which isn’t a big deal…unless, you know, it gets flooded with water. Five minutes of low engine revving, and the car was alive. We were up two cars from where we’d been when we woke up. Totally positive developments.

As for the computer…well, my brother happened to have a FireWire cable. I went over (since I could, like, you know, DRIVE PLACES now, which felt delicious, let me tell you), got the cable, brought it home, and thanks to the miracle of FireWire and some foresight on the part of Apple engineers, had me a brand-spanking new clone of my old computer in one hour. We’re talking all my programs, passwords, desktop images, music…EVERYTHING. Which is a cool thing in and of itself, but given my life the previous 48 hours, made me weep, but this time in a “I’m a girl in the 80’s who just learned I had tickets to see Debbie Gibson this weekend at the Worcester Centrum” sorta way.

Course, now, everything’s back to normal. And all it cost me was some money and a few years off of my lifespan. That being said, I’m liquid-proofing the areas around my computer from now on. I’ve found a widget that senses when any water is within ten feet of my computer. Alarms sound off and electric shocks emanate from the keyboard when detection occurs.

Sure, it’s painful, but it’s not $1,100 worth of pain, now is it? Sure, the chances of it happening again are slim, but I am sure as hell not taking any chances. Because the chances are not THAT remote.

Winning the lottery? Now THOSE chances are remote, indeed.