Exam week kicks in tomorrow, and it is time to sum up all those little things I never found time to report when they happened. This is a listing of anecdotal evidence that my life is carefully doctored to amuse. Amuse others, that is.

Exhibit A; the Nazi angle

I’ve finally plunked down the cash and upgraded to a MacBook Pro, Faust. The rationale was that I had no use whatsoever for my desktop computer – I’m never at home to use it anyway. As is customary, my laptop tends to be used by most everyone in our chapter room, and they leave electronic footprints behind. Case in point: a couple of days after getting the MBP, I went to hitta.se, a Yellow Pages sort of service. I typed in H, I, T and got a fairly interesting auto-completion.

Exhibit B; the Internet connection

Back in mid-October, my internet wall socket died and the power outlet next to it fell out of the wall. As is customary, all my “contacts with service administrations”:http://ivan.rusted.se/blog/show/11 went to Hell, but hey, don’t they always? I reported the outage on my landlord’s website and sat down to wait. Mid-January, I come home and try to turn on the light in my apartment. Dark. Actually, no electricity at all. I have to say that I was mildly excited by this regression in technology, but it was inconvenient. Looking around the apartment with a flashlight, I notice a new power outlet where before there was naked 10-ampere cabling. Thirty or so minutes later, I went to the fuse box in the corridor and yes, the fuse to my apartment is – not burnt out, but missing altogether. Being the perfect neighbor, I yoinked the fuse for the corridor lamps and restored power to my abode. Later that evening, I found my proper fuse. Behind my printer. Good job, landlord Henrique! Here, let me put your car keys in an equally puzzling place.

Secondly, I noticed that he had also marked the internet socket as fixed, which was an outright lie. I e-mailed a repeated complaint, and got a mail from Henrique wherein he explained that he had quit, but would turn the task over to his successor. I realized that it wasn’t likely to go down that way, and resubmitted the complaint. Just a couple of weeks later, a technician knocks on the door.

-”Here to fix your wall outlet.”

-”Finally, step right in!” I said, Guitar Hero plastic guitar in hand and nothing but a towel on.

-”It’s hanging out of the wall?”

-”No… That’s the power outlet, that was fixed several weeks ago…”

-”Oh. Must’ve got a bogus report then. Sorry, can’t fix that now, I’ll have to come back some other day.”

Face, meet palm.

Still, just a couple of days later (or months, depending on outlook) I came home to a fixed internet connection. Installed at a ninety-degree angle.

Exhibit C; the phone

My cell phone and I have quite a “story”:http://ivan.rusted.se/blog/show/3 behind us. As is customary, insult follows injury, but it has learned a new trick since then: morning suicide. See, my bed table is ever so slightly angled, so when the alarm clock goes off in the morning, I usually just have to grit my teeth through one or two snooze cycles before the buzzer makes it slide off the table, hit the floor and drop the battery, allowing me to sleep through the first lecture of the day. If that feature had been advertised on the box, I’d have paid twice the price for it.

But insult was lacking from the injury, so I bought a new laptop and synced the calendar to the phone. Somehow the phone thought that the computer’s empty contact list looked more attractive than the one already on it, so it nuked the 130+ phone numbers I had.

Then it turns out that the injury to that insult had expired. One evening I was talking to a friend while in bed, and after hanging up I put it on a flat, horizontal surface on the aforementioned bed table. Just seconds later, I get an SMS and hear the familiar buzz-flunk-splash of a cell phone vibrating, moving an inch and falling into the glass of water I had put it down on. No, I don’t have your phone number anymore.

Stay tuned for the rest of the evidence: the portrait of the assassin, the cult, the pornography and my academic achievements.