Laptastrophe and lapcovery

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We'll just start with the obvious. Taking my work laptop on a pleasure-only vacation was a dumb idea, no matter how lightweight it is, how much bigger its screen, how much smoother its keyboard, how much more comfortable on the lap, or how much of a mild inconvenience it would have been to have installed my camera and photo management software on my personal Surface before I left. A dumb idea. Readers, if presented with this decision in your futures, your choice is clear.

I got out said laptop at our hosts' home on Monday evening for some very excellent or terrible reason, I don't recall. As our conversation picked up, it was time to close the laptop ("flaps down", a client of mine once said) and set it aside to focus appropriately on the people in the room. This is where being outside of one's regular routine failed two of us. I placed the laptop on its edge on the floor, leaning against the sofa, plugged in and charging, but I didn't realize that I didn't understand the contours of the sofa or the likely traffic patterns in this living room which is not mine. The owner of said living room did not have any knowledge of my habit of leaning a laptop against furniture in this manner, and certainly wasn't looking for laptoppy obstacles in his way in his own very familiar place.

And so, when our conversation and exchange over photo albums got animated, I happened to look down and notice my laptop had gotten knocked over and was now leaning in another direction entirely, against a different piece of furniture, with its power adapter plug still attached, but sticking out at an unfamiliar angle. As with body parts and buildings, unfamiliar angles are never what you want.

Panicky inspection indicated that the cord was still getting power from the wall, but the charging light on the laptop itself had gone dark: no power was coming out of that plug into that socket. Removing the plug from the socket revealed that its metal tip was half-bent, half-broken.

Now, the level of horror I felt at that moment was not really proportionate. Powering up the laptop showed it to be perfectly functional, just no longer chargeable, so my worst-case scenario was only replacing the charger cable, which in the scheme of things is just not a big deal. But it certainly drove home the realization of all the other types of things that could have gone wrong, and all the ways I could have destroyed or lost the work laptop itself, and perhaps the true horror was all-at-once realizing the dumbness of the idea of bringing it at all, per above. Because I don't own it, my employer does, and there's pretty much no way I'd ever get a replacement half as cool as this one, especially if the reason for needing a replacement was something dumb I did, I was dead lucky to get this one in the first place and I don't know if they even make a model like this anymore...

Plus, a whole week-and-a-half more travel without a usable computer?! Inconceivable!

Meanwhile, though, Dieter had sprung into action. He leaped out of his seat and produced a little home voltmeter, whose poky tips confirmed no power from the plug. He delicately manipulated the bent plug with no improvement.

I grabbed a nearby computing device (fone or Greg's laptop, I don't remember which) and immediately brought up Amazon.de and .com to see whether I could order and rush-ship a replacement power adapter to our hosts' home, since we were scheduled to be there long enough to receive it. Dieter sputtered: "No! Why? We can do it!" I was dubious. Results came up on-screen, and, well, this laptop is over two years old, which makes it a dinosaur, and the only replacement adapter cables listed as compatible with this particular model were from sketchy third-party resellers at prices ranging from $60 to $100. "Absolutely not! That's too much! We!" In our excitement, both his English vocabulary and my ability to interpret had become slightly degraded, so I wasn't clear what he was even proposing to do. He mentioned an electronics store in the city. I was dubious: if Amazon doesn't have replacement adapters in stock for this older model, a shop definitely won't either. But he insisted, and looked gravely offended, and they're our hosts, and absolute worst-case scenario I can have Amazon deliver to our hotel in Prague next week when this plan doesn't work.

It was settled. We made a plan to visit the electronics store the following afternoon, which, the following afternoon, is what we did.

The store, called Conrad, was less like a consumer products shop and more like a hobbyist parts and components shop (Radio Shack or parts of Fry's at home). Dieter gazed longingly at some cool gadgets along our way, but otherwise moved purposefully to a counter in the back, where he showed the broken adapter cable to a woman and she disappeared into a back stock area. Greg and I inspected quadcopters and balsa wood dowels and other fiddly bits while we waited. Dieter finished the conversation in possession of a tiny packet, nowhere near the size of an adapter cable. He paid, shoved the tiny packet into his pocket with some Euro coins, and we headed to the car and home.

And this is how I learned another dimension of this awesome man who came of age and built his career in the DDR starting in the 1960s. When I met him in 2005, he was working in IT, but I suppose it stands to reason that his work hadn't always taken the form of 2000s technology—he'd originally been trained to do TV and radio repair.

Dieter invited me and Greg down to his workshop in the cellar of their six-unit apartment building. There, in a small storage unit, I was wowed to see a compact but extensive electronics workbench: wires, tools, meters, magnifiers, clamps, diverse mystery devices. I know almost nothing about electronics of that sort, so I made it my job to shut up and watch. He cut open the original broken adapter tip to see how the wires inside connected to the metal parts of the plug, a small cylinder with an inside and outside, one positive, one negative, but he wasn't sure which was which. By stripping just enough casing away, he could expose the color of the underlying wires, test them with one of the meters, and see which wire went to which part of the plug before cutting off the broken bits. This was accomplished and then he cut off the broken plug once and for all.

He pulled out the tiny packet, which contained a new straight plug and a new 90° angle plug and invited me to choose one. Since a 90° angle plug would almost certainly have prevented this problem in the first place, I picked it, and he set about soldering it into place on the original adapter wires. This, too, was efficiently completed. He tested it on a few meters and confirmed power to the inside and outside bits of the plug tip. Success!

We marched triumphantly upstairs to plug it into my laptop.

It didn't work. The charging indicator light on the computer remained stubbornly dark. I powered it up and demanded that it tell me again that it wasn't getting power, which it did.

We jimmied the plug around in the socket, and discovered that by pushing it hard in and sideways we could get the indicator light to flicker on, but not stay on. Dieter jabbed at the socket in a way which made me quite nervous, and he wanted to take the laptop apart and inspect the socket from inside. Now I started to feel a more justifiable kind of panic. What if we'd damaged the socket and its connection to the motherboard, or whatever it connects to inside before the motherboard? That's not going to be a workbench fix nor an Amazon third-party-seller fix.

Fortunately, I've never owned a computer I didn't take apart and mod myself in some manner, and this one is no exception. I've replaced its hard drive and its memory already, so getting into it would be no big deal, and I insisted on doing that myself. Dieter produced a right-sized screwdriver and I popped the bottom of the casing off. The socket looked fine. Not bent, not moved out of place, well-connected to whatever it connects to. He wanted to do something with it, but it looked OK and I just couldn't bring myself to risk breaking it more.

While I put the case back together, Dieter disappeared into the cellar again. After a while, he returned with the cable equipped, not with the original 90° angle plug, but with the second straight plug.

It didn't work either, in the same way.

This time, Dieter requested Gudrun's assistance and they both disappeared for a good while. They returned and when we tried to insert the plug into the laptop socket, it wouldn't go in at all. "Ah!" He grabbed a file and filed down the outside tip of the plug. We tried to insert it again, and it went in a tiny bit, then stopped hard. No go. He inspected the plug and the socket and seemed to arrive at a conclusion. He headed to the cellar yet again, and I followed.

"Hey, bring the laptop down too, so we can test it there instead of climbing up and down." Right, like we could have done an hour ago. Oops.

It turns out Dieter's hypothesis was that the inside of the cylinder wasn't making its connection with the little poky bit (that's a technical term) inside the socket, and thus either the positive or negative (I didn't learn which was which) wasn't contacting. He had filled the entire cylinder with metal solder and used a Dremel to drill it back out, at a smaller diameter, so the cylinder would be a tighter fit on the poky bit and would make a solid connection. The new issue was that the Dremel diameter (he'd guessed 0.7mm) was too small, so the poky bit was hanging up on the plug and preventing it from going in at all. He changed the Dremel bit to 0.8mm, drilled it out, and we tested it again. No go. The 0.9mm bit was lost, so he had to go up to the 1mm bit, and at this point I vaguely recalled seeing measurements on those Amazon listings: 1mm inside and 3mm outside diameters for this type of plug. We held our breath, and after drilling the 1mm we tested it on the laptop.

Click. The adapter plug slid into place, we plugged it into power, and that laptop indicator light lit right up: red, charging. Victory.

Back in the day in the DDR, the East German people weren't permitted to watch or listen to western media. For the People's convenience and safety, all TVs and radios sold in the DDR were built to prevent receiving these harmful communications at all. Not surprisingly, an underground cottage industry developed of electronics technicians who could modify official DDR devices to receive western signals, be it for dissident activity or, often, just for watchable entertainment. Dieter would have possessed all the necessary skills during the right time period, but I never got an answer as to whether that was a service he'd ever provided...

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Comments

[J&J]

Plug
Amazing that you were in the right place to get repairs! Congratuations to Dieter for his talents!