In the last 8 weeks, my XBOX has failed, my stereo receiver has failed, my son's new tablet that Santa brought him for Christmas has failed, and this morning my laptop screen was inexplicably rotated 90 degrees to the left. Try turning your mouse to the left and getting around the screen when left=up and up=right. Turns out that was an easy fix, and likely caused by my cat walking across the keyboard. :)
The XBOX issue was solved by charity - a friend shipped me their old XBOX 360 since they had gotten an XBOX One. Super thankful for their generousity.
Tomorrow maybe I'll have time to tackle the tablet failure and figure out how to get it resolved via warranty repair or something since even a factory reset had zero effect. Pretty sure it should work more than 5 weeks, especially when I know my son has taken good care of it.
Today I did manage to carve out a little time to call Onkyo about the receiver, which had failed a year ago and got repaired under warranty at an authorized repair shop. It is still too early to tell if Onkyo is going to do the right thing and support their product, my call did not end with a satisfied customer. But my subsequent post on their Facebook page seems to have illicited a helpful response, so we will see where that goes. It is pretty sad that the 20 year old Radio Shack receiver in my bonus room has had no problems, while this new reciever has now stopped working a total of four times (twice I managed to get it reset on my own) in a little over 3 years.
Whatever the outcome of the latest interactions with Onkyo, two things will happen. 1. I will blog about the entire experience, good or bad. 2. I will make all new electronic purchases possible from Crutchfield from now on. I am good at many things - data analysis, cooking, drywall repair - but I don't know a damn thing about A/V. I don't have the time to do all the research on what I should buy to replace this receiver (if it still comes to that), and a friend suggested Crutchfield has advisors who will help. So I submitted the online webform asking for product recommendations. OH MY GOODNESS. They were prompt, helpful, didn't just try to sell me the most expensive item possible, great service, no high pressure sales, and when I replied with a heavy sense of humor, they volleyed right back and made me laugh out loud. I am so incredibly impressed with their customer service, I can't say enough good things about them.
I find that this inspirational phrase works better if you're on the glass-half-full side already. If your glass is half-empty, it just smacks of convincing yourself that settling is tolerable. YMMV.
In the big picture, while having these gadgets all go wonky at the same time is a huge pain in the butt to deal with, super frustrating, and potentially expensive, it is such a First World Problem that I can't get too bent over it. Me and the kids are healthy, I'm working on some cool stuff in my job, really the year is off to a pretty good start.
That said, please Tech Gods, don't break anything else for awhile please.
<-- poster from The Watermelon Factory