Technical difficulties; the story of my life. And bitching about them publicly seems to be the key to success in my life. They were supposed to have ended nearly a year ago, when I arranged to buy Eve, my fantastic new (lightly used, only driven on Sundays, albeit by a Vangroover singleton, not a little old lady) laptop, a Dell Inspiron. It has bells! It has whistles! It has the machine that goes PING!

It has a dead laptop cord.

And, of course, they are available for sale. For almost exactly half of what I paid for the computer in the first place.

I went to ReBoot, my favorite little DTES computer bits and bobs shop. They were very sweet and went through all their cords and turned up blank. I went to FreeGeek, which I dare not do by myself since they’ve probably read what I’ve said about them (repeatedly, over the last three years) and would off me if I walked in without escort, so I got an intimidatingly-tall escort and away we went to the retail shop of Freegeek, where we were told “You want a laptop cord? You’ll have to wait till So-and-So gets back. He’ll be back in a half an hour. Maybe.” No, here’s the box, you can look through it yourself. No you can leave the model here and we’ll see if we have it. Nada.

I believe the technical term for this is “par for the course.” I do believe they mean well. I do believe they have a wonderful mission. And I have never, not once, seen them deliver that mission to anyone on the Downtown Eastside, although I have frequently offered my ear to my friends who have to vent about their experiences therewith.

I support them, I really do, I just wish they didn’t routinely suck.

Anyhoodlewinklewhatever, we rooted around for far too long anyway and So-And-So never showed up and they didn’t have the cord in any of the boxes we could get our paws on, nor did they seem to have any index of anything they had. Or if they did, they weren’t telling.

Which brings us to YOU!

Knowing as many people in the tech scene as I do, I have reasonable faith that one or more of you has, in that inevitable pile of plastic-coated macrame under your desk, a cord exactly like this except for the fact that it, you know, works. It is, of course, unlike every other cord on the face of the planet (certainly different from all of mine, and who thought we’d ever see the day when I have an extensive collection of laptop cords, eh? and a fine lot of good it has done me).

And the netbook I’ve borrowed from my friend Cathy Browne is, of course, unable to upload the pictures of the laptop cord, so I’ve had to wait a week and a half until Roland had the brilliant idea to take the chip and upload the pix to Flickr from a computer that could do that, which is really something I should have thought of myself, except that experiencing the internet by essentially looking through a straw has a way of limiting one’s vision over time.

And now, to the sexiest centerfold you’ll ever see (assuming you’re a retro-tech perv who doesn’t get out much):

Back of the brick of the power cord

Super duper closeup action of laptop cord brick wooo, exciting!

and this is what it looks like supine. Did you know that word, supine?

and another aspect:

the pointy bit Tab A which goes into Hole B in the computer

Three the hard way, the bit that goes into the brick

And that’s all she wrote, except that there’s a reward for the first person to solve this problem for me. I dunno what, but it’ll be nice, I promise. And unusual, considering the source. I ain’t got nuthin usual. I’m all out of it.