A Great Blonde Moment

I once heard a woman say "A protective mother will take her child to the hospital for a skinned knee." This quote really relates to what happened this week between Mindy and I.

For those of you who wonder who exactly "Mindy" is, she is my Sony Clie PDA (Sony prefers to call her a PEO). Last week, I put her on her cradle for bed, and went to sleep. I woke up in the morning, had a shower, set her up to "hot sync" with my computer Mortimer, grabbed her and ran out the door, only to realize she only had 60% battery life. This is not a normal happening, since she just got off the charge from a good nights sleep. So I go about my day only slightly concerned. It is when I get home that the real trauma occurs. I put Mindy on the cradle as I sat down to work on my latest paper for Marketing Research, and glanced at her out of the corner of my eye. Where was her charging light? Where was the light that indicated she was even ON the cradle? Perplexed, I picked her up, blew into her connectors and put her back down onto the cradle. Still no light. I unplugged the cradle from the power strip and put it into another outlet. Still no power. I am concerned.

Let us give a touch of background information to this blonde moment. For those of you out there that have made their way to my site from ClieSource, you know what I am talking about. Unless you have a portable charger, when you go on a trip, you take your cradle. The cradle itself plugs into an AC adapter via a TINY little plug in the back of the charger, and the usb connector for your computer. Of course once you put the TINY little plug into the cradle - you forget all about it. Now, for the closing background statement, let me say this: I do not have a travel charger. I take my charger every other weekend to Seattle, something was bound to happen. Back to the story.

I sit concerned for a night, trying to see if perhaps there is no light because of some faulty wiring, but she is not charging. Nothing is occuring, but she will hot sync. I do a soft reset (its like restarting) and it doesn't work. I am freaking. I go on a mission to find Sony's tech support and find myself talking to Edison, a lovely man who is working in Florida. We speak and I do everything he says. He registers me, helps me through things, and then says "Okay, first we must do a hard reset". (Hard resets are like reformatting your computer) - I put tech support on hold, hot sync'd Mindy, and performed the operation. Edison says "Okay, we are coming to get her"

I am traumatized. Mindy is but a month or two old and there is a chance she is leaving me. Even worse, I would be without ANY form of PDA for who knows how long. I am now dependant on her. My life is organized around her. She is my lifeline to sanity. And she would be GONE? During final exams? During the registration period? During... AHHHH!!! This can't be happening!

I do everything Edison told me to do so that they would come pick up Mindy. I take off her screen protector (which was a royal pain in my ass to put on in the first place I must say) and clean her up all pretty for the nice doctors at Clie General.

And then, tonight, after 3 days of being Clie-less, after 3 days of worrying whether Mindy would make it home, after 3 days.... it came the time to watch a movie - Mortimer supplies the DVD player for my tv (he is a laptop) and the movie begins. Once over, I place Mortimer back on the desk, next to his love Mindy - and get down on my hands and knees to plug him in - when out of the corner of my eye, I see a little, tiny plug. One that any person would forget about after plugging it in the first time.

"HI Sony? Um, don't come take my Mindy, I am blonde and she is fine. Its called plugging the power in."

I was just as bad as those horror stories you hear from computer companies like Gateway. You all know the story - guy goes out and buys a brand new computer, sets it up but it doesn't work. He calls tech support and they tell him to push the power button, or plug the fucking thing in. My goodness. I think I got my first gray hair over a handheld computer. Wait til I have kids.