. . . and then there was pickle.

I would now like to outline a recent sequence of events that will further outline and highlight my great apprehension in regard to my genetic material.

I haven’t had the best of luck lately with technological devices.

This is my recollection as best as I can muster, and if called in to testify – the facts may be altered slightly, but mainly in relation to dates and times. I screw things up. Its been known to happen, and there’s really no one to blame but Mr. Jackson’s ‘man in the mirror.’

The background and base for this story lies in my uncanny knack to fry hard drives. This could be related to the fact that I refuse to pay top dollar for a computer, and usually piece them together from geek warehouses of used materials that somehow resemble a shady edited scene from an old Star Wars movie – this apart, I have lost more Word Docs and originally Lotus Spreadsheets than the average human.

I have a history of failure.

Christmas 2003 I was gifted my first ipod. It was a ten giger and was my new favorite toy. It lasted just long enough for me to dump a glass of cheap red wine over into it. Yes. That’s what I said –Carlo Rossi Paisano into the ipod. This was an uplifting moment for me, as it confirmed my place in the universe - as one of those people that really can’t be trusted to have nice things. I hate it when my father is right.

By the way that warranty thing - doesn’t cover stupid.

So I got my new ipod, the twenty gig, for Christmas ’04. I have always been a music person, and now that I had a player that could almost hold all of my CD’s I converted my entire music library – all 300+ CD’s to my hard drive.

The irony is that I bought my first fancy schmanzy, brand new, Best Buy 80 gig drive for the sole purpose of music storage. I was very careful with this drive – no late night impulse porn surfage or anything. And yet one day there came the error page and the inability of my machine to take me to wonderful world of windows.

One must also note that after converting my music to the drive – I whored my discs out on half.com like a junky at Christmas.

One of the reasons I sold my CD’s is I thought that as long as I have both my CPU and my ipod – I’ll be safe. Well it has been months since my drive crashed (I’ve been living on an old Dell laptop), and now the tale of woe ensues.

I will now backtrack and give the parallel story. I had an old piece of crap Nokia phone that had the butt end of it ripped out by the cleaning lady in our hospital room when The Pickle made her arrival. The phone worked, but was unable to be charged. I spent a month saving the remaining charge – trying to find some way to copy my contact list onto a new phone to alleviate having to manually transfer all of the numbers (like 200). As it turns out I did something in my past life or they’ve really kept better track of this one than I was hoping – but I had to spend an entire night of my life copying all of these numbers (there goes another bottle of Paisano).

So last week when the thunderstorms came through – we rushed to get everything inside from our outside luncheon. What was apparently left behind was my ipod, which was playing through an old set of computer speakers that were purchased at the afore mentioned Star Wars scene.

Two days later I cannot find my phone.

In the space of days I have lost over $5,000 worth of music, and every phone number I have in the world. Not to mention the cost of the ipod, and the phone.

All my fault.

Some of you may recall a very positive and uplifting sequence of posts a while back. This is sarcasm - I was a depressed freak. This is the correlation.

Correlation is not causation.

And now, at last, here comes the ‘up with people’ happy ending:

So I was mowing my lawn (for the first time since I lost my phone), and much to my surprise I see my phone – covered in mud, having been rained on for a week. I plugged it into the charger, and I’ll be damned if it didn’t come back to life. Go Kyocera.

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store to find out how much is was going to cost to fix my ipod – when the man behind the counter said, “I see you didn’t purchase the extended warranty – well, we’ll just exchange it for you.” No shit. Brand new ipod.

On the car ride home last night I get a call from a friend of mine, my old IT guy from my company, who said he’ll be by this afternoon to recover my files from my old drive, and get my old PC running again.

So all is right in the world again.

I don’t know the direct route of causation between these events and The Pickle, but I’m sure that her having a father that’s not an irritable SOB for a couple of days is bound to have a positive effect.

Pickle’s Papa