Yesterday I had a rare 1D-10t user moment. Having worked with technology all these long years (ever since I got my first TRS-80 at the age of 11), I rarely have found myself needing to call Tier 1 support to solve a simple problem with hardware or software.

Well, the other day we had our first tornado warning in our area… lots of hail, lightning, wind, etc…

After the show was over, my wife discovered that she couldn’t turn her computer on. I wander over and try a few simple thing like unplugging it from the wall and back in, removing the battery and back in, and pressing the power button a few times (kind of like how we all press the elevator button to make it “hurry up”).

Nada, and I’m pissed.

The brand new (well, brand new for us, it’s a refurb) laptop I bought my wife is now a $500 brick, because I assume that an electric surge took out the motherboard and I was stupid enough to not put a surge protector on the outlet in the kitchen that she uses.

Last night I call up the vendor to see what the 90-day limited warranty covers and if I can get a replacement (obviously excluding the electrical storm, sans protection, bit) and the support starts going through his usual spiel.

“Hold down the power for 10 seconds”

“Hold down the power for 30 seconds”

“Remove the battery, and plug the AC adapter in, and power up”

Now I’m sitting there as patiently as possible because I know they have to do all this with the schmucks who call in who don’t know that the power cord has to be plugged in for an electrical appliance to work. When we got to this step though, the unit powered on.

Weird.

I powered down real quick, placed the battery back in it’s slot and move the laptop a little. I try to power up but then it doesn’t work again!! WTF???

Ok, plug the AC adapter back in and now it powers up. A little light goes off in my head, and after the OS boots, I unplug the power cord and am immediately presented with a low battery alert. Turns out that the AC adapter connection was a little finicky and so the laptop was running on battery power and had eventually run out of juice.

All I needed to do was jiggle the little thingy on the back of the gizmo and it would have worked and not provided yet another 1D-10t story to the Tier 1 support tech I talked to last night.