Stupid Macbook!
Argh!
After work on Friday, we went out to grab groceries and dinner, then I came home and we tried to watch something on the TV. Our Google box wasn’t working correctly, so I went to grab my Macbook to take a look. As I went to pull it out of the dock, I noticed the screen wasn’t closed all the way, and upon inspection the entire thing’s swollen up! Yep, it looks like mine has fallen victim to the battery swelling stuff Macs seem to be prone to.
So I immediately shut it off, notified work that I’d be logging in from a new device, and set about setting up a temporary Linux machine so I can continue working on Monday. In the mean time, I spoke with AppleCare, which luckily I still have about 4 months worth of left.
They were adamant not to turn it back on, which is fair but grabbing my SSH key would have saved me a fair amount of grief. No matter, we have processes for this at work and it didn’t take too long to get all set up (but on a side-note, I forgot just how bad trying to work from Linux was, not even Chromium worked first try! On Ubuntu!).
I have three options: I can ship the laptop back. They will send me a box to put it in and prepaid shipping labels. No I can’t use the box it came in, I must wait for the box (which probably wouldn’t get here until Tuesday or later, then I must ship it and wait). I could take it to an authorized service provider (closest one about two hours away), or they would send someone out for an on-site repair. I initially balked at the last one in times of COVID, but it looked to be the way to go. I’m skeptical if someone will actually come all the way out here, and whether they’ll actually be able to do anything here or if I’ll be waiting a week or more for something to be shipped anyway.
But I decided to call up Wattle Office Supplies anyway, as they’re basically my nearest provider (there’s another one in Hamilton, but that’s nowhere near my folks so I’d have nothing to do while I wait). The tech on the phone was super helpful: they could squeeze it in if I came today, but he checked and he didn’t have the parts so he’d have to order them anyway. In the end I decided to see how the on-site repair panned out, rather than doing a 4 hour round trip in the heat and not even have the machine for work on Monday.
Interesting sidenote: my almost-8-year-old Toshiba is still going strong, though I do only get about 45 minutes of battery life out of it now.
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