I Am A Walking Electronics Curse.

I have a history of breaking electronic devices.  Not physically breaking them, though it’s miraculous I haven’t broken more console controllers in my years of video game tantrums, but somehow breaking them on a software level.  Electronic devices just stop working for me.

It’s not like I’m fiddling about with advanced settings or poking around in raw code.  I don’t touch that stuff (though I did once when I was a teenager and internally mangled a brand new computer).  The only things in the Settings menu I ever touch affect color displays and existing sound effects.  I’m as casual a user as could be imagined, with my only long stints of use involving either writing scripts or playing games.  I have no idea why, one day, without warning, without fiddling with settings, without having installed any new software, electronic devices just go haywire and cease working for inexplicable reasons.  It’s baffled several tech-savvy friends and repair professionals over the years.

It can only mean that I’m cursed.

The curse seemed to reappear yesterday.  I had set my phone aside, plugged into the wall to charge, while I played games with my son.  When it was time to go on an errand, I fetched my phone and discovered it simply would not turn on.  It would not respond to anything.  There was no way to decipher what was wrong because it was wholly inaccessible.  Needless to say, I was frustrated.  Not only had my aggravating curse returned, but repairing it or replacing it was going to be a massive expense.  I was preparing payment plans or cheap replacement solutions when I decided to try what I assumed would be the hard reset option (I was out when this was discovered and didn’t have internet access), and held the buttons I guessed would work for just a few moments longer than last time.  It worked, and my phone reset.

Turns out I had left an app running when I plugged it in, and this app has had a nasty history of making my phone crash.  So, after yesterday’s scare, I decided to delete it from my phone to be safe.  My apologies to all 15-20 of you following me on Snapchat.

It was a close call, but it reminded me how fragile my time with electronics can be.  Even now, as I sit down to write this blog post, I’m slightly worried that something will go inexplicably wrong with my trusted laptop and I won’t be able to finish this before