Every so often columnists need to write “feel good” columns so their readers feel good about life.
Today I’m writing a column, dear reader, that should make you feel good about your life—at least in comparison to mine lately.
You see, I have had troubles in triplicate, what I might call a tech trauma trifecta. In the space of a little over a week my home air conditioner quit, my computer died, and my cell phone drowned.
As happens to many of us on the Westside of the Central Valley, air conditioning systems wait until the outdoor temperature gets to 110 degrees before quitting, which was my recent experience.
Thanks to the advice of Marg Benton, the kind realtor who helped me buy the house I’ve lived in for the past three years, I have a home warranty plan, a wise idea since the house was built three-quarters of a century ago. But such a plan can create some challenges.
So it was with me, when the warranty company assigned an HVAC business to repair my air conditioning. The good news: before long a repairman was at my house to check things out. The bad news: he said my whole AC unit would need to be replaced, and it may take a while.
Meanwhile my house served as a sauna, a kind of “sweat house” common to some indigenous cultures, because I indeed sweated.
Each succeeding day I checked in with both the home warranty company and the HVAC repair shop. Each said it was waiting on the other.
I didn’t have the guts to sweat it out indefinitely. A family member suggested I get a one-room portable standing AC unit, and another family member helped me buy it and set it up, which turned out to be a challenge, but one successfully overcome.
I’ll be forever grateful to them, because at least my wife Sandy and I had one room that was cool, the bedroom, enabling us to have a decent night’s sleep.
Meanwhile, the rest of the house was toasty, except for early in the morning when I opened all the windows and doors to let in cooler air. By 9 a.m. I had to shut them because in the heat wave we were in it had already reached 90 degrees.
I thought I could cope. With a fan directly on me, I could go to the room where my desktop computer resides and do what I needed to do, including write and submit my column.
You can imagine my thoughts and feelings when one morning, as I sat in my sweatshop and turned on my computer, I heard the loudest and most irritating sounds imaginable, a repeating series of blasts that told me my desktop was in very bad shape.
I checked in with folks in a local computer repair shop I had successfully used before. The two men who worked there, both named David, after carefully examining the sick computer I had brought into their shop, pronounced it DOA. And they knew this computer well, since they had used a kind of CPR on it a few months before to bring it back to life.
OK, I said to myself, I can cope with this. I used an I-pad until I figured out the best way to replace my desktop, even though an I-pad is much more limited than a PC. Besides, I still had my cell phone I could use to communicate with others by text and email.
That was true until the next day when the cell phone slipped out of my hand and fell into a tub of water. Quick as a cat, I grabbed the phone — just 2.5 seconds after it had plunged into the water. Maybe it would be all right.
Such was not the case. First the screen, almost dark, gave me a bizarre message and then went black. When I turned it off and restarted it again, all it did was faintly buzz.
I sat down and contemplated. My house was hot, my desktop was dead, and my cell phone had given up its cyber ghost.
I trust by now, dear reader, you’re feeling good, or at least better than when you started reading this column. Thank goodness, you’re saying; this happened to Spevak and not me.
This sad story of my tech trauma trifecta, however, does as a happy ending, eventually. After two weeks of my waiting, the home warranty and HVAC companies finally got their signals straight, ordered the right equipment and Fernando, the AC repairman, after six hours of a herculean effort working solo, installed the new equipment and got the system working.
Meanwhile, I went to my cell phone company and bought a new phone, among the least expensive. The young people behind the counter were sympathetic and helpful, although one of them did say, “Man, the phone you had sure was old.” And they were able to transfer information via the internet from my old phone to the new one.
Finally, David and David sold me a refurbished computer and monitor, after they had transferred data from my old computer to my newly acquired one. And as I write this, I’m using that computer.
So maybe, dear reader, you’re feeling really good now. Perhaps for a while you were feeling guilty because you were smiling, maybe even chuckling, at my technological misfortunes. Now you can expunge that guilt from your conscience and enjoy a story with a happy ending.
My wish for you is that you never encounter a tech trauma trifecta in your life. But if you do, suck it up, as I did, and maybe, eventually, life will get better.
John Spevak’s email is john.spevak@gmail.com
