This story is in the first book created from this website, Mentally Incontinent. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do, please consider picking up the book. It's chock full of stuff just like this.

The Motherboard Chronicles 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6| 7

II. Freeze!
The day the gigantic blue and brown cardboard box arrived containing my precious and wonderful laptop, I was overjoyed. All of the horrible demonizing thoughts related to Dell and their woefully inefficient processes fled from my mind to make room for a puerile kid-at-Christmas technical lust as I ripped through the tape and lifted from its foam-lined transport my brand new, shiny silver Inspiron 8500. This thing was absolutely stacked: a Pentium 4 2.4 gigahertz processor, a gigabyte of PC 3200 RAM, built in wi-fi for anywhere-in-the-house internet access, a 40gb hard drive and the most gorgeous 17 inch widescreen monitor I had ever laid eyes on. I pressed the power button and after a very short time was greeted with the sweeping intro music that accompanies the Windows XP introduction on a new system. I fell head over heels in love.

For the next few weeks, work became nothing short of a pure joy to do. I looked for any excuse to use my new toy. Every story I wrote shone crystal clear on the massive screen, every song I played sounded absolutely amazing on the tiny little laptop speakers that were embedded in the front of the laptop. I craved interaction with that highly portable and ever so pleasant to touch super-sleek shiny machine. And like all relationships based purely on lust, it only took a short time for things to begin heading south.

I was working on a project that had just become my “New number one priority”, one which overshadowed absolutely everything else in our CEO’s vision and absolutely had to be completed “yesterday, if not sooner”. My every moment was fluid, and for nearly eight hours solid, I was a programming machine. I was copying and pasting like a fiend, reusing code like nobody’s business and setting a pace which would have led me to completing the project that afternoon when, without warning, my machine completely froze. Not just a stall with some beeps every time you hit a key, mind you. This was an absolute catastrophic failure. It was like someone had poured sand in the gears that ran the clock of time – everything stayed on the screen, completely immobilized and unresponsive. I attempted to control-alt-delete out of the hang-up to no avail. I clicked every window, I frantically slammed the ‘windows’ key to try to get some response from this machine. And the worst part – I hadn’t saved my code in at least four hours.

Sighing the heavy sigh that accompanies horrible twists of fate which cannot be changed and almost always mean more work, I pressed and held the power button of the laptop to get it to shut down, but it wouldn’t. It just sat there, staring vacantly back at me - almost mocking me. Several infuriating minutes of this left me with no other choice but to perform an ‘ultra-hard reboot’, whereby I yanked the power cord and the battery from the machine. I immediately heard the sound of power ceasing to flow through circuitry as the screen went black. I counted to one and then replaced everything my laptop needed to run. The machine booted back up and within a minute, I was back in Visual Studio 2003, coding furiously to make up for the lost work. My pace was frantic but my performance was solid – for about two minutes. For just as I was getting going again, the machine pulled the exact same stunt and went still. Again, nothing I did would register at all on the monitor or audibly, and again I had to perform an ultra-hard reboot. A few choice words later, I was once again back to coding – until once again the temperature inexplicably dropped within my machine’s processor and the damn thing froze once again.

So, I called Dell. It took a few minutes of pressing the right combination of numbers to get through to the right department, but perseverance won through and after a small time I was connected to the ever-so-helpful Dell technical support people.

“Yes, well, it seems that my machine is just randomly freezing for no reason whatsoever,” I explained to the disinterested man on the other end of the line.

“Mm-hmm,” he croaked back to me. “So you are using the machine as normal, and suddenly it stops responding?”

“Yes, exactly!” I replied. “I was just working on my – Oh, shit!” Immediately it occurred to me that I had just screamed a vulgarity into this man’s ear, so I stammered in embarrassment and begged for his forgiveness. “I am so sorry about that, but man, it just did it again!”

“Mm-hmm,” He said eerily. “Well, what were you doing when it stalled?”

“This time? Nothing. Seriously, I had just moved the mouse across the desktop and it –“

“Well, sir,” he barked, “Have you recently installed any software that may have caused this to happen? Any software, say, from the internet? Such as a Comet Cursor, or Gator, or…”

I know that this guy didn’t know me, but I could have sworn that he was trying to insult me. “No. No no no. I don’t use that crap,” I replied smartly. “I have more sense than that.”

“I… see… And what was it, exactly, that you last installed?” He sort of smacked his lips as he completed the sentence.

“Hmm…” I replied, thinking back to a few weeks prior when I prepared my machine. “I guess that would have been Visual Studio 2003.”

“Mm-hmm,” He replied, sounding not unlike a police officer who was growing tired of hearing the burglar with the big puffy eyes and tears streaming down his face say that he was nowhere near the store when they tear-gassed the robbers inside. “Well, I have to tell you, that sounds suspiciously like a software problem.”

“Uhh… NO…” I started to reply, until he cut me off again.

“Yes, sir, that would have to be something with Windows. I’m going to recommend that you reinstall it.”

“Look, dude, I’ve been using Windows since version 3.1 and I have been writing software for over ten years. I know the difference between a software error and a hard freeze, and I am fairly certain that this is NOT software related.”

“And how, exactly, do you know that?” He asked snidely.

“Well, for example, when Windows craps out, it either flips to a blue screen or holds resources, but it doesn’t lock out I/O. When you hit the keyboard or unplug a USB device, the machine still recognizes it and lets you know with a beep.”

“Is that so?” He replied. “Well, sir, I am certified on Dell Machines, and in my opinion, it’s a Windows error. So what I am going to do is dispatch a service technician to come by and –“

”What? You’re going to send someone here to reinstall windows for me?” I asked. “That’s really a huge waste of time. I could do it myself.”

“If you think you’re qualified,” He replied, verbally punching me in the nuts. I slammed the phone down quite hard on the cradle, causing everyone in the office to turn and look in my direction.

“I told you, man. You should’ve bought a Toshiba,” My manager Kevin said. I couldn’t disagree.

It took about two hours, but I got Windows XP reinstalled on the machine. Restarting with a completely blank slate, I went through the interactive introduction and mentally cursed the fact that I was going to have to reinstall a massive amount of software. Just moments after I told Windows that I wanted to use the Eastern Standard Time Zone, the machine whispered “fuck you” via a series of whirs and clicks and locked up once more.

So, once again, I called Dell. Luckily, I managed to get a very pleasant and easy to talk to female who actually knew something about what the hell was going on.

“Wow, sir, that sounds like you’ve either got bad RAM or a bad motherboard. Would you mind running through some tests with me?”

I was elated. “Mind? Oh dear woman, I would be pleased beyond belief to run through some tests with you, no matter how long it takes. I just thank God that you actually have an inkling of a clue as to what end is up.”

She chuckled. “Well, sometimes, people are just ready to head to lunch or go home and they aren’t really interested in helping out. Me, I just got here, so I have a while yet before I get to start pissing people off.”

She guided me through rebooting with the Dell Diagnostics disk and running through a series of tests which thoroughly checked the RAM – memory address writing tests, reading tests, conditioning tests – and everything came up hunky dory. We began on the motherboard test, and not so much as a second into it, the machine locked up.

“Wow, that’s definitely not good,” She stated. “Yep, looks like your motherboard is fried.”

“Oh, wow,” I replied morosely. “That sucks quite a lot.”

“Yah, this actually isn’t the first time I’ve run into this with the 8500. The good news is that we can get a tech out to you first thing tomorrow morning, so your down time will be minimal!”

She put me through to the fulfillment department and they verified the issue, then logged my information and set up an on-site repair for 10:00 AM the following morning. When that time arrived, the tech showed up right on time and immediately set upon testing my existing configuration to ensure that my claim was legitimate. He booted up the system and began running through mundane tasks, such as opening notepad and running Internet Explorer, and did so with not so much as a hiccup.

“Sir, could you show me exactly what you were doing when your machine froze up?” He requested.

“Sure, which time?” I asked.

“Well, I guess it doesn’t really matter,” he said, “I just need to verify that the machine is behaving as you reported before I repair it.”

“Well, alrighty, let’s see…” And I began running random software and doing random things. I went through just about every task I could think of that I had experienced a freeze during and not one replicated the behavior.

“Dude, I swear to God, this thing was freezing up on me every ten minutes!” I said frantically. I swiveled around in my chair and pointed toward my fellow developers. “You can ask them! They saw it!” Each of them nodded in response.

“Well, sir, if the machine isn’t hanging up, I am not authorized to proceed with repair,” He explained. “I’m sorry about that.”

A worrisome look fell upon my face. “No, wait! You can’t leave!”

“Well, I’ll be here for another moment longer,” He said impatiently. “I need to call the office and let them know the status of this call.”

He stepped out into the hallway and began talking to his home base. Frantically, I began slapping keys and jiggling the mouse in an attempt to get this bastard hunk of metal and wires to quit screwing around and get busy freezing. And just as you have probably expected, it kept on functioning exactly as it was supposed to, processing and performing higher math functions like any good computer should. The technician returned to the room and observed that things were still coming up aces.

“Well, sir, I need to leave, I have another call. If you have any more issues with this machine, call Dell, they’ll arrange for us to come out.” And with that, he spun on his heel and made for the door. I twisted around in my chair and slammed my fist against the desk in frustration, causing the mouse to bobble off of the surface of the Formica, prompting the cursor to move just a millimeter before it entered into the catatonic state I had come to know so well the past few days. Having thought I had seen it seize up, I jiggled the mouse and hit the Windows key, to no avail. A manic grin spread across my cheeks and I hurriedly rushed out to the parking lot to catch the technician before he exited the premises.

“HEY!” I screamed and waived my arms frantically in the air as I caught sight of him reaching his vehicle. “It did it! It froze up! Come look!”

With a huff, he performed an about-face and made his way back into the building, where he saw my freshly frozen laptop sitting there staring blankly back at him. He maneuvered the mouse, he tapped on the keyboard, he received no response whatsoever. His mood changed from disdain about having his time wasted to a willingness to set things right. “Well, alright then, let’s see about getting this thing repaired,” he boasted.

Twenty minutes later, he replaced the last of the screws that fastened the back casing of the laptop to the front, new motherboard in place. He flipped it over, turned it on, and asked me to perform some tasks. The machine ran like a champ, and for some reason, the eerie feeling that was always present with me that things were about to explode was gone. “Looks like it works okay,” I said.

“Okay, I guess that’s it then,” He replied. He instructed me to call Dell should I run into any issues, shook my hand and bid me a fond adieu. I wished him well and immediately began the arduous task of reinstalling all of my development software (and Winamp, of course). And so begins my experience with motherboard number two.

It wouldn’t last very long, I’m afraid.



This is part 2 of a 7-part story. Maybe I could tell it in 2 parts, yes, but then it would be missing 5 others. If you want to read them, you can by clicking the links at the top of this page.