Would you like a little cheese with that whine?
Whining and complaining are something I have little time for. So instead,
I'll just laugh at whatever fate, or God (Buddha, in my case) has decided for
me.
It is the evening of the laptop disaster. I'm printing
Chinese New Year special menus. The huge box that contains my office computer
and server started beeping. The noise was a high/low beeping sound that was
downright annoying. Now, of course, something must be wrong.
My hope was that some trickster had somehow managed to violate the
layers of anti-virus protection and firewalls installed in the system. It wasn't
that. I was forced to resort to something that I really hate to admit
having to do. The cause of the sound could be discovered by shutting the whole
thing down, and then pressing the DELETE key while booting to go into some sort
of diagnostic mode.
The "system health" screen revealed to me that the fan which cools one of the
chips had stopped turning, and even though the chip wasn't anywhere
near its shut-off temperature, the alarm was there to alert me to the fact that
the fan was no longer turning. That cooling should be a concern is particularly
ironic in my case because the office I keep this device has no heating vent. To
bring it up to even 60 degrees in this weather I must keep the door wide open.
Else it occasionally gets below freezing in this room.
Ridiculously funny are the only words to describe the sight of me, with
server pulled out, bending over cables and office furniture in the tiny room, in
a futile attempt to get the thing to spin by removing the dust which encrusted
all the fans by vacuuming them. Words cannot describe the look upon the
face of the employee whom, seeing me dragging the vacuum into the office,
decided to help. I can only imagine that, given my precarious position, and the
fact that my back was arched and the carpet wand removed from the thing, he
thought that I were committing some unspeakable act with the
vacuum hose.
So tomorrow, the day before Chinese New Year's Eve (a very special event
around our restaurant), I must remove the errant cooling fan, drive it 20
minutes over to the only serious electronic parts store in the area, and pray to
all things Holy that they've a fan that will fit. Else I guess I'll have to
super-glue the thing in. And given my penchant for wanting what I want when I
want it, I'd hazard a guess I'll resort to that (unless my run of good luck
is done with tomorrow, and such fans come in standard sizes).
More importantly, something in the scheme of karma is trying to keep
me away from my computers. Two down; two to go (God forbid!)
To whom or what does one pray to rectify such a run of bad luck? I'm pretty
sure that Buddha isn't interested whatsoever in my computer troubles (and may
even be visiting these problems upon me by way of getting me to rest my eyes).
So I'm going to leave this terminal now, and shut the thing down before the
beeping noises push me over the edge and I get carried away from it,
perhaps drooling and mumbling nonsense to myself.
But you can bet the farm that when I get that damned fan removed from the box
tomorrow, when I'm done at the electronics store, I'll probably do a jig upon
it that would make "Riverdance" look like a three-year-old trying to tap
dance.
Today I messaged another noder about how we share good karma and don't allow
the poison of hatred to invade our souls. Dislike, yes, occasionally, but no
room for hatred. So I lied. Right now I'm basking in a hatred so foul that even
the most profane words known to English scholars cannot describe it. And I don't
know whether it's aimed at the fan, or at computers which don't work the way
they should, in general; or perhaps myself, for not investing a little time in
loving care (cleaning the fans). Perhaps tonight's rest will cure
me of this horrible condition. I can only hope.