SelfAbsorbed.ME : ‘It’s Your Life, We Just Write it Funnier’

So remember way back when I described the day my landlord forgot to get oil to heat our building (including the water) as the worst day of my life? (Okay, I tend to exaggerate, that’s nothing new.) Well this weekend I crowned a new winner of the title “Worst Day of My Life.” Now this one really is a doozy.

Saturday morning: I wake up, and lazily go to my computer to check emails. While trying to do this, I get the hated spinning beach ball of death, which, for Apple users, means you get to restart because your shit be frozen. So, I turn my computer off manually, and back on, with the power button. This is fairly routine.

But when my computer started up, in the place where that glorious Apple logo should’ve been over the glowing grey screen there appeared…. a blinking folder with a “?” in it. This could not be good. Did The Riddler infiltrate my iMac? What the hell is going on? And did I mention that I bought this computer, brand new, 6 months ago?

So I turn to my boyfriend’s Apple laptop for answers, hoping that I am just a few keystrokes (huhuh strokes) away from salvation. Wrong. After restarting, resetting PRAM, and even shouting obscenities at my computer, nothing managed to bring it back from it’s zombie-like, blinking “?” state. I called Apple tech support where a robot in India was kind enough to offer me no help whatsoever, except the difficult task of making an appointment for me to see a “Genius” at one of the Apple Stores in Manhattan. “Why thank you Kind Robot, when can someone fix my computer?” “11pm tonight.” Wut. Because that’s just how I want to spend my Saturday night….

Now if you’re the kind of person who works in media, you know what a big deal it is for your computer to die. It’s like being a painter and having your hands chopped off, and any recent work destroyed. And then if someone is able to re-attach your hands, it’s not much good because they’ve forgotten how to paint and they’re attached all backwards and stuff. I mean, yeah, one day you’ll learn to paint with your feet but what good is that?!

So anyway… despite my fury at the situation, I tried to enjoy the remaining daylight in my lovely, unseasonably warm, Saturday. That night, boyfriend and I packed my behemoth 24″ iMac into its box and prepared to shlep it through the projects to a point where we could catch a cab. And we did. Ten blocks and two very sore spines later, we were heading to the Apple Store in Soho for my appointment with disappointment.

We get to the Apple Store in Soho and it’s…. closed. I’m not at all surprised. So we jump back into the cab and go to the Apple Store on 14th Street. After explaining the situation to an employee while trying to hold back my tears of white hot rage, he goes to see if someone can help me. (At this point, I don’t think Jesus Christ himself could help me.) Miracles abound, and one of the magical genies, sorry, “geniuses,” that works upstairs has benevolently agreed to look at the failed machine they so recently sold me for the same price as a month’s rent in a three bedroom Chelsea apartment.

As I’m being escorted to the third floor, the menial employee chides me several times for not having an appointment. Even though I did have an appointment, (you stupid fuck! With your stupid gap-tooth and hipster glasses! Fuck! Fuck you!) made directly by Apple employees, to go to a store that was already closed. And I was 30 minutes early. If I could’ve burned this guy with laser vision, he’d be totall fucking toasted.

As badly as I want to wrap up this tale of terror, it didn’t stop. Mr. Genius Know-It-All looked over my computer, plugged it in, and confirmed my worst fears - the hard drive was fucked and would need to be replaced, meaning all of my software, data, etc,. was gone gone gone. He managed to break this horrible news to me without the slightest hint of apology or remorse, and in fact talked to me like I was a retarded third grader whose computer broke down because I tried to stuff a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into the disc slot. It was going to take “3 to 5 business days” to fix the computer, whence I could make the delightful journey back to pick it up myself. As I struggled to not punch this guy in his stupid face, he also informed us that we’d have to take the giant computer box with us, because I guess taking responsibility for an empty box is beyond their doing and possibly not covered by their insurance. So hooray, we’d get to go back to Brooklyn on public transportation with a huge empty computer box.

On the brink of spontaneous combustion, boyfriend and I got on the A train back to Brooklyn. When we got to Jay St-Borough Hall, the last stop before ours, we were informed this would be the last stop and we’d have to take a shuttle bus from there. Well peachy! Who doesn’t love a crowded fucking bus? So we get onto one of the half dozen shuttle buses lined up outside the station assuming it would shuttle us along to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop, from which we could walk home.

….After being on this bus for about 10 minutes and passing every recognizable landmark on Atlantic Avenue, including the Hoyt-Schermerhorn stop and Atlantic Terminal, I realized we were going express, non-stop, to Utica. i.e., Malcolm X Blvd. Which is exactly where I want to be with a huge computer box at midnight on a Saturday night. After about 30 or 40 minutes on this bus ride of hell, we are dropped off on the other side of Bed-Stuy with no reason left to live.

And that, friends, is how I died.