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Crunch. Whirrrrr. Crunch. Whirrrr. Crunch. Whirrrrrr.

I know you’ve all heard gears grind before, right? It’s actually been proven that sound is worse than Lloyd Christmas’ most annoying sound in the world. It’s really truly awful.

That was the sound I heard as I put down the foot rest on our reclining couch last night. You see, we have one of those couches that has motorized reclining footrests because we’re completely against the idea of exerting any type of physical energy whatsoever when we’re in relaxation mode.

The motor raises the footrest and it puts them back down as well, and last night, for whatever reason, my footrest got stuck on its way down.

I was in a really vulnerable position. Seated in the couch and essentially no way to see if anything was under my feet that could be causing some kind of obstruction. I figured there must have been a shoe or a small child in the way but the metal on metal sound made me think it had to be something else. Perhaps the mechanism had lost a bolt and wouldn’t collapse correctly? I had no idea.

In my turtle-flipped-over-on-its-shell-with-no-visibility state I had my son Brady inspect the area underneath the footrest for me.

“Do you see anything under there?”, I bellowed.

“Nope. There’s nothing under there dad.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yep, all clear.”

At that point I either had to force the footrest down to the closed position or live on the coach in a reclined position for the rest of my days. Those were my only two options.

After an hour or so of contemplating couch life… I made the decision to try and stand because of the whole bathroom (or lack thereof) situation. There isn’t really a great way to run plumbing to a couch, and I’m not about that bedpan life. Not yet anyway!

I forced the footrest down with the mechanism grinding all the way until it fell into the closed position, and that was that.

Fast forward to lunch time today and I was looking for my laptop so I could answer a few emails after my midday meal, and I couldn’t find my laptop anywhere. I figured one of my kids must have hauled it off but didn’t think much about it again.

Later in the evening I looked a few more places for the MacBook and couldn’t find it anywhere. It was the most bizarre thing.

Then Jackie reminded me that I had hidden the MacBook from Patrick the night before because he was getting upset.

You see, Patrick can have a bit of a temper when he’s upset and we’ve sacrificed several big screen TVs to the digital gods over the last few years. I didn’t want my laptop to be our next sacrificial lamb to the slaughter.

He was watching “funny ice cream vine fails” (yes, I’m serious) on YouTube and was getting really tired and was making weird demands that were impossible to meet at 8:00pm. He slammed my laptop lid shut so I quickly tucked it away as to protect it from imminent destruction.

Suddenly it was one of those movies scenes where everything started to move in slow motion.

OHHHHHHHHH SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

I TUCKED THE LAPTOP AWAY IN THE COUCH #@#!*#$@!!$&!!

THERE’S NO WAY THAT GRINDING NOISE LAST NIGHT WAS MY LAPTOP, WAS IT?!?!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO #@#!*#$@!!$&!!

Sure enough, I reached down into the small gap between the seat cushion and the edge of the couch and pulled out the ghost of my former laptop.

Shockingly it was powered on and working totally fine, even though its poor aluminum nether regions had been totally separated from the rest of its body. I could see directly into my laptop’s innards. It looked so defeated and betrayed.

WHAT HAVE I DONE?!?!

Click each image to see the carnage full screen

The moral of the story as I see it is to always give your kids anything they ask for no matter what and your stuff will never get broken. I think?

There is a somewhat happy ending to this story. I do have AppleCare+ so while I do need to pay a small replacement fee, I should get a full repair without having to buy a new laptop. Because had that been my only option, I’d probably be using the ShrapnelBook Pro (hahahaha this is a pun) for the foreseeable future.

Buy AppleCare.

P.S. Our couch reclines very smoothly now. I’m gonna live there for a while.