The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Poor Mike. He has terrible luck with laptops. When he started law school he had an old laptop. It needed replacing, so he bought an IBM. It immediately died, so he bought an HP instead. It has continually and repeatedly died throughout law school, leaving him to scrounge for altnerate technological sources like an ancient Apple (so ancient it is pre-Powerbook), his girlfriend's laptop, and probably some other laptop I'm forgetting about. As it is his HP is dead again, and it is currently out with them for repair (or ideally replacement under lemon laws), so he is once again laptopless.

But my sympathy may have suddenly lessened. See, last week during bar review I'd left the room for a moment, and when I came back I found that Mike had pulled up some sort of "Yankees suck" web page on my laptop. Ha ha, very funny. But the full effect of his mischief was not felt until today when my laptop fully and completely died. About an hour ago. There I was, innocently typing email, when the computer froze. And when I cycled the power, nothing happened. I suspect nothing ever will happen. The thing is utterly and completely dead.

So part of me thinks this was somehow Mike's fault. He touched the laptop, and the laptop died. Is that not exactly why the res ipsa loquitor doctrine was developed? Of course there's causation - the thing speaks for itself!

Well, maybe. The theory I'm working with actually is that the parts IBM replaced last year were bad. They had replaced the harddrive, the system boards, and a few other parts. But they didn't last. Of course, they "conveniently" managed to last until a %$&#ing week after the warranty expired. So tonight I was on the phone with IBM, telling them that they need to fix this anyway since the "new" parts they gave me apparently weren't good. They said they'll decide whether they'll deign to in a few days.

But either way, I'm back to being a luddite. EVERY TIME my life gets complicated, the technical underpinnings collapse. But I guess it could be worse. The computer is not necessary to study for the bar, first of all. Now, I was in the middle of typing up nice outlines to study from, and those seem lost(!), but I can get a few of them back and anyway there's always the Conviser book. I did lose my datebook information, but as was discussed earlier, I already lost a lot of my datebook information and it wasn't the end of the world. I will feel silly having to call those doctors for my appointment information again, but in the meantime I suppose I can reconstitute much of what was gone, although if you gave me your contact information any time within the last year, please send it to me again since my backups are really, really outdated. And that's what's really annoying. I started to get ready to back things up, but did I? No. Not yet. Dammit!

On the upside, I don't have to re-rip my music because I've got the iPod. And in a way it's sort of freeing to lose a lot of old clutter that I never had the bandwidth to go through and organize. I'm at a place of newness in my life, so maybe a fresh start will be nice. But there are a few things I'm really pissed about losing - mostly projects I was currently working on - and it will be disruptive to not have the technical infrastructure I've come to rely on there to be relied on. Plus either way I slice it, it's going to cost me money I don't have to replace it somehow.

Anyway, tomorrow I'll go see if there's any way to suck data off the harddrive, and then in a couple of days I'll figure out if IBM will do right by me or decide what to do next. (e.g., pay IBM to fix the old thing, replace it completely, or go laptopless for a while - maybe getting that Treo to get by with instead.)

I would, however, prefer to be studying...