I really hope a certain Canadian corporation figures this out. And fast.

Unfortunately this time there seems to be a run on these things. No third party alternative and everyone’s adapter seems to have kaffed out at the same time – like the light bulbs in our house. NO ONE in the city has any. Not even the Apple store. All I could get from anybody was empathetic shrugs.

I’m writing this now on my old PowerBook G4 – which is clinging to life by its fingernails. Every once in a while the screen decides to go ape shit and put on a 60′s light show with shredded fractal screams of colour – or it just stalls and sits there – taunting me with that fucking spinning beach ball of death – and then later, whenever it feels like it, pops back to life like nothing was wrong. The battery is dea and the power adapter for it is held together with an unholy combination of electrical tape, paperclips and a hollowed out cap from one of those small traveller tubes of toothpaste you get in the little cheesy toiletry puch they sometimes give you when you fly first class – it’s been a while but I hang onto that shit for nostalgia’s sake and for the inevitable MacGuyver moments like this.

I did disassemble my newer power adapter and the mag safe connector is a marvel of miniaturization — eensy weensy tiny circuit board and two teeny tiny led’s and really really really small microchips and the most microscopic of blobs of solder you’ve ever seen. I got it working again – for about 3 minutes – and then it snapped, crackled and popped again and I thought I’d best leave it alone instead of risking frying my entire machine.

This old clunker I’m on at the moment is painful to use because the fan inside churns away and sounds like a jet engine – with shredded metal inside – and a chorus of fingernails dragging down a chalkboard – riding sonic waves that are constantly irritating and pulsingly piercing – the sort of shit that makes a dog long for ill treatment in Guantanamo – and then it ramps up to an even higher pitch, just to let you know it’s doing its best to completely fuck you in the middle of your skull. This is the kind of tortuous sound that penetrates even my full enclosure ear phones with the Ramones playing at full blast. This machine is really only suitable for use as a BitTorrent downloader – with the office door closed – and me on the other side of the city.

You said in your Facebook message to me ted that you had a spare.

A SPARE!!??!!

I am going over to your house now. I will gnaw through the bricks to get at it. I can’t wait for a 3 week online back ordered delivery. I neeeeeeed it.

I’m going to post this whole repsonse as a blog post now.

Cheers.

Legendary service. Legendary piece of crap cord design.