What Made you Smile/What Ticked you off Today?

[Ziggy]

In November of 2016, I got a TERRIBLE ear infection from wearing ear buds too much.

What is "too much" exactly? Just curious.

[SamuraiMegas]

It's been a nice 6 years but I am permanently leaving racketboy. If you would like to contact me my Reddit and steam usernames are the same. I wish all of you well.

-Tom

[ElkinFencer10]

It's been a nice 6 years but I am permanently leaving racketboy. If you would like to contact me my Reddit and steam usernames are the same. I wish all of you well.

-Tom

[samsonlonghair]

That seems sudden.

[SamuraiMegas]

Nah, i've been considering it off and on for about 3 months. I may get on every few months for BST stuff however. Right now i'm just waiting on a few messages before I log off.

[samsonlonghair]

Alright Megas, I didn’t always agree with you, but it was always a pleasure having you on the forum. You seem like a pretty cool young man to me. I’ll welcome you back if you ever change your mind. For now, Best of luck to you. Peace & chicken grease!

[nullPointer]

So ... my PSP fell onto our hard tile floor not once but twice over the last couple of days. The first time is because it was charging on the kitchen table and one of my kids snagged the cord with a foot. In that instance the UMB door got knocked a bit kattywhompus and I had to gingerly snap it back into place. The second time I was just carrying it across the house and the unit flopped out of the case, which knocked the battery out and caused me to lose ~1.5 hours of playtime in Final Fantasy Tactics: WotL.

Luckily the PSP seems to be pretty resilient, and the screen is a beast (seriously if the same thing happened with my phone that screen would likely be completely destroyed now), but all the same you hate to see your aging hardware getting knocked around like that. #butterfingers

[marurun]

Yeah, my Switch has hit the floor at least once. Really glad Nintendo builds things like a plastic tank.

[Michi]

I watched a video of someone dropping a switch from a good height from a drone. Sucker still turned on (one of the joycons was shot, though.) One of the benefits of your console manufacturer being a toy company is that they seem to plan for every system to eventually end up in the hands of a three-year-old in the middle of a 'Imma drop everything' phase.

[Key-Glyph]

I keep wanting to share a really heartwarming story here but it's continually seemed like a bad time. A lot of folks are going through a lot of things, and my changing the subject to a random feel-good ramble kept feeling inappropriate. Then I thought, maybe we all need some smiles and reminders that folks will go way out of their way to do a solid for a stranger. So without detracting from anyone's more important business, here comes a slight distraction.

About a month ago I decided I was going to bring my 2-XL to work. If you never had a 2-XL, it's essentially an adorable robot boombox with specialized tapes that leads you through trivia programs. My particular 2-XL is one of the originals from the late 1970s, and its power source is a little bizarre -- the AC adapter plug is actually a 3.5mm connection -- so I decided now was the time to finally buy a 3.5mm swappable tip for my Enercell multi-voltage adapter instead of using the grungy power source that came with the unit. Treating my 2-XL to a modern upgrade! So exciting!

When the tip arrives, however, my excitement over new gadgetry mixed with a migraine headache (i.e. impaired cognition) resulted in my attaching the tip the wrong way. With the polarity reversed, the robot ran backwards for a moment before going silent and giving off a heartbreaking electrical smell.

I'm devastated. Who will be able to fix this?! Long gone are the golden days of a TV/VCR/Stereo repairman in every town. And these original 2-XLs are 8-track players -- that's even old by old standards! Without really having hope of ever getting my precious robot fixed, I do an internet search out of despair just to see if anybody's out there.

First crazy stroke of luck: there's still a repairguy in my town. I call him up and ask if he does repairs on 8-track players. "Well there's something you don't hear everyday!" he laughs. I explain the situation and he tells me to bring the toy in so he can have a look at it overnight. So I go visit.

Now, I have to stop for a moment and describe this guy's store. It was nestled behind a bunch of trees in an old building he shared with a car mechanic. I walk in and it's exactly like the shop of the repairman we went to when I was a kid (and whom I adored and wanted to grow up to be): the front room is entirely wood-paneled, the floor coated in thin, dark, scratchy carpet, and the walls are covered in certifications for different electronics and brands issued as far back as the 1970s all the way through to the current decade. So not only had I found a repairguy... I'd found a master of the craft! Lucky again!

I wind up shooting the shit with this guy for an extra fifteen minutes with smalltown talk, which seemed too a lovely relic of the olden days.

He calls me the next day to tell me exactly what I'd fried in my poor little robot. And here comes the third stroke of luck: Even though I was clearing out my house for a move, I still had a non-working 2-XL I'd bought as a backup for precisely this kind of scenario. This "for parts" robot was literally slated for the garbage bin within a day or two alongside other house miscellanea. Well, not anymore! Off it goes to the repairguy so he can swap out the busted parts.

If you've stuck with me this long, thank you. Here comes the heartwarming part.

In the end, this repairguy didn't just swap out the few ruined bits from my fried 2-XL. He went an extra ten miles and compared every part between the two, and anything in the "for parts" robot that was in better condition than my main robot, he swapped in. My 2-XL now has all the best available pieces inside of it that I've ever owned. Then he walked me through even more stuff he did: sealing cracks, oiling knobs -- even fixing the 8-track cartridge that had been another casualty of my adaptor error. And then he undercharges me!

I gave him 30% tip. No way was he going to go through all that effort for an archaic toy and walk away with pocket change.

And now, the final piece of good fortune. Before I leave, we gab a little more. He tells me that he's come to accept that the profession has moved on; the week before I wandered by he'd had zero walk-ins. Young people and the current world just don't need his services anymore. "You're the youngest person who's walked in here in at least five years," he says. "Having anyone walk in under the age of 45 is an anomaly. You're an anomaly!" I laugh and ask him when he's retiring. You know what he tells me? "Officially? This Friday."

So in summary, I blew out my 2-XL, found one of the most qualified and nicest people to fix it, and all within a week of this guy closing shop for good.

UNBELIEVABLE.

Thank you, repairguy. I wish you the happiest retirement and smoothest move to your new digs in Florida.