A Day With No Laptop

8th Light Apprenticeship - Day 113

This morning my laptop crashed and gave me the white screen of death. Not something I have seen before. After turning the machine on and off multiple times, it didn’t change.

In the end it came back to life for a few minutes, just enough time to push an updated .vimrc to github, before it crashed again. As I couldn’t do any work on it, I ventured off to the apple store to see what they could do.

On the apple website you are unable to make an appointment, so you have to turn up and wait in the queue. When you get to the front of the queue, you explain what is wrong and they decide whether you need an appointment, and if you do, you are put on a list that may take 2-3 hours to get to the front.

When you do get an appointment allocated, you receive a text message and have to leg it to the shop, as after a few minutes, if you have not arrived, they cancel your appointment and the whole process would have to start again.

As it turns out the graphics card in the laptop needs replacing, so has gone in for repair. Luckily there was a new laptop to pick up from the apple store, so the last hour of the day was spent setting it up, enough to demo my Clojure tic tac toe tomorrow.

It wasn’t the day I had planned in my mind, but I imagine a lot of consulting is dealing with the unexpected, keeping calm when days do not go to plan, and keeping customers informed when you loose a day of implementation which you thought you had. There is always a bright side. All of my important work is safe on Github, I have a brand new laptop to use in the interim, and 4 bags full of peanut butter M & M’s that were kindly brought over from the States for me. Every cloud has a silver lining.