man, this tablet project. so it stopped charging. it was at…

so I get on the internet and order a replacement battery.
in the two days it takes it to arrive, the tablet somehow charges to 100%?

it arrives and I'm like "eh, fuck it. I have the battery here, that one is old, I might as well swap 'em.
I try to open up the tablet, following the instructions, and... the digitizer cracks.

it turns out the fact I had to replace the digitizer before meant that the new one wasn't glued in as well as it should be, so when I pried it open, the wrong part came off. Whoops.

that's okay, because of an amazon mix-up long ago, I actually have a spare digitizer on hand for this tablet! I can just replace that after the battery.

so I finish taking out the old battery, start inserting the new battery, screw it in, and... the power connector won't attach. Odd.

Maybe they sent me the wrong battery?
The old battery connector looks like this in my microscope.

and the new one looks like... oh shit.

so I go back to amazon and tell them "THIS BATTERY IS DOA REPLACE IT" and they're like "sure. just drop off the bad one at a drop-off place"

so I put the tablet mostly back together so it won't get damaged while I wait for the new battery to arrive, and...
oh. it's not just the digitizer. the screen cracked too. motherfucker

so I get on ebay and find the replacement screen and order that. I put the battery to be replaced back in the packaging and put it by my bedroom door, and go to sleep

I wake up in the morning and I'm like "I'm gonna go get coffee and drop off that amazon box!"

the box isn't there.

apparently while I was asleep, my lovely wife cleaned up some boxes in the room, and thought the box-in-a-box was empty. so she put it outside our room, in the hallway, to be taken to the trash/recycling. uh-oh

so I go out there and... it's not there either.

oh goody. my roommate was nice and proactive and didn't procrastinate on cleaning up boxes for trash/recycling and... it's gone.

and today is the day the truck comes and empties out the trash & recycling.

but good news:
it turns out she took it out AFTER the truck came!
I go out to the trash bins and it's sitting there, on the bottom of the recycling bin.

see it turns out that it being after the truck came makes it harder to get: if the truck hadn't come, it would have been sitting on top of a big pile of recycling.
since the truck did come, it's now on the bottom of the recycling bin.
6 feet (2 meters) away

so I go get my grabby arm thing and grab the outer box, and... it falls over. throwing the battery box out of it.

so now I can't grab the small box.

so I go back in and grab a pole I had handy and shove the battery over to the lower end of the recycling bin and FINALLY I GET IT

so now I can return it to amazon, and the recycler isn't going to get a Spicy Exploding Surprise

this is how far the story goes at the moment.

The drop-off point is less than a mile from my apartment, but at this point I half-expect that I'm going to make it halfway there and my car will get hit my a train

there's not a traintrack I'm going to cross to get there, but that's just how this project is going

anyway the replacement screen is on the way too.
it's probably going to arrive folded in half

also I'm pretty sure I passed the point where it would have been cheaper to just buy a new tablet like 8 steps back

anyway I haven't because of the Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
I can always afford a 20-30$ replacement part. I can't afford a 400$ tablet

anyway bring this fact up reminded me that a family member sent me a cheque for chrimbas, and I haven't cashed it yet. I should do that now!

and my bank's mobile app (which can cash cheques) is down.

I would normally take a screenshot of this to show you, but it turns out my phone just goes "image is null" when I try to take a screenshot. I think that's because my bank app uses that security protocol thing to disable screenshots.

normally when I run into this problem I just take a picture of my phone's screen using another device.

usually that's my tablet. *sigh*

I could use my webcam, but it turns out my webcam isn't working.
(I had a major USB Crisis the other day and disconnected a lot of USB hubs and shit to diagnose it, and haven't yet reconnected them all)

there we go, got it to work. sorta.

good to know it's on their end.

god, I bet they turned off the fucking backend servers (running cobol) for the christmas-new-year break.

just because they don't have any techs in-office to refill the punchcard bins

I say that like it hasn't been under like 8 hours since I was last researching building my own punchcard machinery.

an amusing related thing about banks and history:
I noticed that the #1 time I am most likely to brainfart and use my birth name is signing cheques.

You'd think that might make sense: I've had my current name for like a decade, cheques are getting less common, so most of my cheque-signing was naturally back in the Dark Ages of the 90s and early 2000s, when I had my boring name.

and it seems to make sense, for about 10 seconds, then you remember I'm ME.
I live in the 1990s PROFESSIONALLY.

I have like 3 Win95 machines within reach. There's actually almost a dozen pentium computers sitting on my bed right now!

but I'm never making an account on a BBS using a real dial-up modem and think "oh I'll just type in my old name here!"

it's only cheques.