So here’s how it goes.
I head off on a nice little trip that may or may not allow (depending on the demands of business and family) some extended time period to test new equipment, or new configurations of the same old stuff, that is successful (rarely) or fraught with tension, expletives, and great expense until compromise exists between aspirations and reality, at least to the extent that I can impose enough basic functionality to accomplish my tasks.
That time my hard drive would not boot, at all, and you kept badgering me about why I wasn’t happy and cheerful? I was mourning the loss of 6 months of work. Do you feel better now, because I feel about the same.
But normally it fails in much subtler ways and the worst of all is that everything works under regulated and controlled conditions because as Akbar says- it’s a trap.
Generally speaking returning from such an expedition is a good time to implement change. You have huge holes where you ripped out your dual purpose stuff to put your improvements in and when you have a big, old, and mostly fixed system like mine it may be the only time you can adjust the fundamentals of your wiring harness.
Of course the one that fails is the one at the back of the closet, buried under piles of cable representing the years and years of faithful service it has uncomplainingly rendered, the first one in and the last one you test because it was working perfectly fine when you left.
And there is an explosion of chaos and entrophy. Not just the same garbage you left behind with another ring of dust to mark the occasion, but also all the new garbage you unpacked and on top of that successive layers of garbage memorializing each and every failed fix, stirred around to find that piece that you had in your hand not 5 stinking minutes ago.
If you are persistent, and organized, and knowledgeable ,eventually you achieve a state from which to contemplate the devastation you have caused in pursuit of incremental and minuscule advancement and no longer have an excuse to eschew responsibility because of unmitigated calamity and this, alas, is mine.
Did you miss me?