A thing about Machines

I am a huge Twilight Zone nerd. I have seen every single episode *although I'm not so keen on the war or western ones* So there is one particular episode about a man named Bartlett Finchley which is seriously amazing. Played by Richard Haydn who I remember from my Catholic school upbringing as Max Detweiler from the Sound of Music. Finchley has a problem with machines. Radios, televisions, typewriters and even clocks conspire against him. He often needs to hire repairmen to fix appliances that are malfunctioning and no one believes that the machines are the trouble. He has a feisty attitude and is mean-tempered.

Firstly, this dude is obviously gay. Yet, it's the 1960's so Finchley is closeted but he wears ascots and smoking jackets with a fierceness. He ices my cold black heart with this sneering phrase.

"Alright dear friends, you may remain on my property goggling at this astonishing sight for another three and a half minutes. If when I return with my car keys, you are not off my property, I shall enlist the aide of this underpaid gendarme to forcibly eject you...IDIOTS!"

Best episode ever!!



So, what the hell does Finchley have to do with me? We suffer from the same affliction. We are technophobes *although I really adore technology, I just suck at keeping the shit working* Every electronic gadget I have ever owned has inexplicably broken. I have gone through several ipods, iphones and even the fridge in our house has cost us a fortune in repair bills. You have heard my constant whining about about my computers and cameras *yeah, I still have not taken the Nikon in for service* I often wonder why I even bother purchasing warranties which never seem to work in my favor.

This past weekend, I felt the urge to kick Antz ass in a game of tennis, on the Wii of course *ew, sweat!* So I popped in the disc and oddly, the Wii wouldn't read it. I'm used to seeing error messages so I tried again thinking the disc may need cleaning. I used my old school CD cleaning kit and so I wiped the seven year old scratched disc. Same message, Unable read disc please remove disc, restart console. Grrr! I try this several times using other games to no avail. I am frothing at the mouth with irritation. Feeling stumped with frustration, I turn to the internet for solutions. I watch a few youtube videos of young boys offering their solutions but don't feel comfortable using a homemade lens cleaner made from an old dvd and bandaids on my Wii. I asked my cousin his advice but it led to me having to purchase a Nintendo lens cleaner set from Amazon. So now my Wii is only good for watching Netflix until I get the cleaning kit.

Then last night, my electronic curse unfortunately moved onto Anthony. He went to use his laptop and his Wacom tablet wasn't working. We tried everything. It wouldn't start, I tried plugging it on my laptop, we uninstalled drivers and reinstalled them. Updated till the wee hours of the night. Finally we gave up. I was under the impression it was still covered under warranty since we just bought it last year but as fate would have it, it expired in August. Sigh. We have come to the conclusion it may be a faulty USB cord, *hopefully* so I have to go pick one up.

I haven't updated my iphone to the new ios 7 because A. my iphone doesn't have enough space to download it and B. I am afraid it will break my damn phone! Am I the only one who has a thing about machines? I am a certifiable gadget killer.