If It Weren't for Bad Luck...

I've had a string of bad luck the past couple of weeks. I still have my health, but somedays it feels like the world is out to get me.

The air conditioning in my car went out at the beginning of last summer. I've been putting off getting it repaired because of the expense, and because I usually don't use the car very much during the summer. I am using it more this summer because...

The starter went out on my Goldwing. It's in the shop right now. Hopefully, it won't be too major of a repair. It's under warranty so my pocketbook should be OK, but the Minnesota cycling season is short enough the way it is - don't want to miss too many beautiful July days.

When I built my new computer, I was never able to make it network with the old one, so I put off moving programs and data over to the new one. That's bad luck on top of the human failing of procrastination. That caused more bad luck.

The old computer died the other night. Diagnostics point to the mother board as the culprit. Fine, the hard drives survived, so I took them out and tried to make them work in the new computer. Not so easy - more bad luck. The new computer kept using an old hard drive as the boot drive. After three painful hours, I realized that the new computer's BIOS was automatically setting itself to use the most recently installed hard drive as the boot drive, even though I was setting the C: drive manually. Maddening.

I made it work and was able to copy files over after that, but...

My internet connection failed. Last night, I spent three hours diagnosing it, including 45 minutes on the phone with Comcast Tech Support. It turns out I had at least three issues at once, or maybe one issue that affected three components. The Comcast guy and I got the cable modem to connect again, then after another hour of tinkering, I was able to get the router back up, but the new computer is still not working. I can see that the computer is connected to the router but it's not connecting to the internet. Maddening.

So I've had a string of bad luck lately. Yet, it's not all bad. No one in the pre-industrial world had air conditioning in their house, like I do. No one had refrigerated food. No one had a device in their pocket that could contact another person anywhere in the world, like I do. No one had the ability to watch "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" at a time of their choosing, like I do. No one had a device in their other pocket that would play their 9000 favorite songs at any time, either.

I have a bunch of conveniences and I have my health. But it still sucks to not have the internet or a motorcycle.

(written and posted at work)