If you work for Apple I might just hug you

So, I mentioned a suspenseful tale of a dying power adapter. Stressful would be more the adjective perhaps. For me. Everyone else was probably sick of hearing me fretting about it.

The weekend before Christmas, when it snowed, I got home from work on Friday and realized that the computer hadn't been charging that day, and when I took the power adapter out of the laptop bag I saw why. The wire right by the brick was melting! Or rather, melted, as it wasn't melting while I watched it. :) Uh-oh... So I plugged it in. Nothing. *commence panicking*

There was snow on the ground, so pretty much everyplace was closed/was going to be closed the next day. The local computer repair place (the one that actually fixes Macs) was certainly not going to be open, and not necessarily going to have a power adapter on hand. Sure, the Apple store in Greensboro would probably be open and should certainly have some power adapters hanging around, but that would mean going all the way over to Greensboro....something we don't do for some reason. If there was a store in Winston, I definitely would have been headed over there to beg for a power adapter from the helpful geniuses. Yep, I said beg. I guess I'm shameless when it comes to my computer.

So...I could order one off of Amazon and get it on Monday, but it would be full price. I could try to find on eBay...nope, not going to work. I pretty much didn't want to pay for it...or certainly not full price. I hadn't done anything terrible to the cord, there was no reason it should be broken and melting like that. In that case, I decided it called for some Googling. Uh-huh, the power adapters tend to melt. Okay then! Next step: call AppleCare. Listen to weird hold music...Leonard Cohen. Then they switched to Simon and Garfunkel which was better.

Finally got to talk to a person: explain the problem, yes, I know I don't have AppleCare service for this computer anymore, but since it's a...KNOWN ISSUE... (customer service keyword) maybe they could possibly do something about it? Finally convinced the lady I talked to first to quit sounding so doubtful and transfer my call...to get rid of me if nothing else. So she transferred me to the electrical department (at least I think that's what she called it...something that had to do with plugs and such) and I got to talk to Sean instead. Sean was helpful, Sean was calm and cheerful, Sean agreed that the power adapter shouldn't be melting and that they would send me a new one and all I had to do was send back the old one and they wouldn't charge me. If Sean had been helping me in person he quite possibly would have been hugged with gratitude. :D Well...maybe. :)

So, Apple got their end of the issue dealt with and gave me a Fedex tracking number. (Incidentally, wouldn't it be awesome to work for Apple?)

I wrapped the cord in electric tape and spent the weekend fiddling with it to get it in a position to work, and panicking when it refused to work no matter how much I wiggled it. I looked at the Fedex website on Monday, saw that it was on a truck and out for delivery. Yay! Very great rejoicing and all that. And so I waited. And waited, and jumped every time I heard what sounded like a Fedex truck...waited...all the way until 6 that evening. By 6 that evening the Fedex webpage said that they were not going to attempt delivery, so I don't know if they were too busy or if they put it on the wrong truck. (The latter has happened before.) Sooo....my computer was going to have to make it through another whole day because I was going to work the next day. *gulp*

It made it. The power adapter came that afternoon and when I got home I hastily unwrapped it, plugged in my dying laptop, and went off to the contra dance feeling much better. :)

I took the electrical tape off the old one before I sent it back...and this is what I found:

















Some, but only some of that black is from the electrical tape. The rest of it and the frayed wires...well...I'm glad nothing caught on fire. :/