Technology Hates Me

There comes a point where sometimes you realize you're being too cheap. Either that time is now, or technology in general has decided it hates me and is now ganging up on me.

I had the internet set up at home, then I had a roommate who had paid for his internet up front at his old place move in. Since I was paying month to month and he still had several months left on his account which he had already paid for, we switched the internet over to his. When he moved out, I decided I could get by without the internet at home, seeing as I could check my e-mail on my phone, and I could look at things online during my lunch hour at work. It worked reasonably well; the only time I ran into issues is when I wanted to put pictures in my blog posts, and those pictures were sitting on my computer at home. A little pre-planning and a USB key could probably fix that, but instead I contented myself with not using pictures.

My phone started having problems :(

So, I took it into the Apple store to get it fixed. They gave me directions on how to fix the issue, and I went on my merry little way. I had every intention of posting today, so I grabbed my laptop and headed over to the Starbucks near my house. Free WiFi and 1/2 price chai? Sign me up! I paid for the chai and settled in for a little blogging when a login screen popped up. Wtf? I asked the barista about it, and apparently their WiFi was down. If I had known that I would have stayed home rather than paying for a drink. *grumble*

But, seeing as I had a drink beside me and a comfy place to set up my computer, I figured I'd fix my phone. I connected my phone to iTunes, synced it, pressed the sequence of buttons as I had been told to do earlier. The phone shuts down, does everything it's supposed to do... then can't find iTunes. Huh? Check the connections, everything looks fine, then the phone crashes. Crap.

All I wanted to do was write a blog post!

So now I'm sitting in the Apple store again, using their free WiFi, while my phone is being restored to its factory settings. Apparently iTunes had to be connected to the internet in order to fix the problem? Nobody told me. It's been several hours since this started, I'm hoping I didn't lost too much.

Did I mention this could have been avoided if I had just set up the internet at home? For about $30 a month? Yeah, time to stop being cheap. I'll call them tomorrow.

The Backtrack

So, while I was looking at the balance on my credit card earlier, I realized I didn't know what I was actually paying for anymore. Was I still paying for my laptop? My car maintenance? Last Christmas? I really didn't know. So I looked it up. Or rather, I tried. Apparently my credit card only allows you to look back at the last 3 months worth of statements. As I switched to e-bills a while back, I don't know if I'll be able to actually look up the specifics... Based on my estimate I'm in the middle of paying off the iPhone I bought in February while I was volunteering at the Olympics in Whistler. Yeah... buying an $800 phone to replace my beer soaked Blackberry while I wasn't receiving an actual pay check was perhaps not my best step financially, but here we are. Either way, when I was forking over the plastic at the counter I didn't expect that 8 months later I'd still be paying the damn thing off. It's definitely making me think twice about buying anything now.

The belt I was going to get this weekend... sold out. Gone off the website. And the sweater alternate is out of my budget. *Sigh* No treat this go around.