Broken stuff, and retail therapy

I've been in kind of a crummy mood since yesterday. It started yesterday afternoon when I broke the coffee pot at work.

Everyone else was gone, and I was walking around locking doors, turning off lights, turning down the thermostat, putting the phone system on night . . . and I saw that the coffee pot had a little bit of coffee left in it, and since it was the weekend I thought I'd dump the grounds and rinse out the pot.

We don't really have a kitchen, just a little "kitchen area," and the sink is what I suppose is a "bar sink." Tiny and square. I pulled the pot off the burner and held it under the faucet to rinse it out, and knocked it against the side of the sink. I heard a kind of soft crushing noise, and looked, and while it hadn't shattered, one side of the bottom was a mass of cracks.

And I don't even drink coffee.

So today I had to buy a new coffee pot. But before I did that, I had to figure out why my internet connection at home was so, well, crappy. Oh, and also, every time I tried to get my email, Outlook Express crashed. Open it up, hit "send and receive all," CRASH. Reboot. Open it up, hit "send and receive all," lather, rinse, repeat. I asked a couple of Mac people I know. One said to trash my email accounts and create new ones. One said to trash my internet and OE preferences, all of which I did, none of which helped.

My original thought had been that it was some particular email that was causing it, but that didn't really seem likely. But I didn't know what else to do, so I went into my Yahoo! Mail account and downloaded all the mail and deleted from my server, then went back to Outlook Express, and everything was fine. Some piece of spam was causing the application to crash as soon as it touched it, I didn't even have to open it.

So this morning I called the cable company and, miraculously, didn't sit on hold for more than ten minutes before a guy answered the phone and rebooted something in the office, and it was fixed. For awhile. It's still intermittently crappy, but maybe it's just because it's the weekend and hot, and people are inside using the internet.

Oh, and then, I tried to do my monthly back-up, and the CD burner won't work. It won't recognize that there's a CD in the drive, no matter what kind of CD it is. This is great--I write to Iomega and describe the problem, and I get a really nice email back almost immediately from a woman asking me some questions, asking if a regular CD will mount, not just a blank one (no, it won't), and she asked if I'd cleaned the lens, and suggested that I get a commercial lens cleaning kit ("available at most computer stores").

So when I went to Target to get the coffee pot (they didn't have one, though), I got a Memorex CD drive cleaning kit (really just a CD with a little brush on the bottom), but after I got home, I thought, oh, if the drive won't recognize any other kind of CD, what would cause it to recognize this one, so I wrote back to "Stephanie" at Iomega (although, of course, the email address is just "support) asking if she had any idea whether the drive would recognize a cleaning CD if it didn't recognize the other ones, because I didn't want to open it if it would just be a waste to try it, and I get an email back that says:

Cleaning kits and well-intentioned Q-tips are unnecessary and potentially dangerous. If you push too hard on the lens while cleaning and damage the mounting, it will no longer matter how clean it is. Iomega cannot support those kits and will not offer RMA for this related damage.

Um, what? How schizophrenic is that?!? Tell me to do something, then when I ask a question about it, say in no uncertain terms that I should not do that very thing, and in fact, if you do, you'll void your warranty.

Then I look at the bottom of the email and it says: "Sincerely, Andy."

After the totally annoying, totally unsatisfying computer stuff, I went out again to go to the grocery store and to WalMart to see if they had a replacement coffee pot. They did, although it's not exactly the same and I don't know if it will work. But I didn't want to just buy the pot, I decided to look around, and I ended up in the shoe department, where I bought three pairs of shoes for, let's see, less than $25.00.

A pair of canvas slides with Mickey Mouse on them for $9.99, a pair of French blue split leather Birkenstock-like two strap sandals for $6.83, and a pair of really cute black canvas backless sneakers with white rubber toecaps for $5.00. And with these bargains, I figured I could afford three DVDs from the $5.88 bin--"Nine Months" (Hugh Grant), "Red Heat" (two of my favorites, Arthur Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi), and "Brokedown Palace," none of which I've seen and even if they're awful, not much more than the price of a rental.

I should have plenty of time to watch them, since my internet connection is down again.