Sooooo, I owe my wife a serious apology for my attitude last night.  I have to admit that I had a rather non-Christian reaction to a disappointment I was experiencing.

I recently had my Microsoft Surface die on me.  I couldn’t get it to power on at all.  I suspect that it had somehow overheated and blown something on the motherboard.  After scrimping and saving the finds to get it replaced, I received my new one the day before Thanksgiving.

I spent the intervening time getting this new one back to where I mostly remember my previous one being in regards to installed applications and functionality.  It’s more than just a personal tablet, I’m using it to test work applications as proof of concept for replacement of our heavy, bulky laptops as hardware gets refreshed. 

Well, this one was working perfectly fine until yesterday.  I left work (working fine), went and picked up my son, and drove home.  I got my Surface out so I could balance my checkbook and pay some bills.  Low and behold, my wireless connection isn’t working.  I spend several hours last night trying to fix it.  It finally got to the point where the OS wasn’t even seeing the wireless device as being installed. 

Okay, so much for accessing the internet on the Surface.  Or being able to use it for it’s intended purposes.  Or being happy with Microsoft that I just received a potentially defective device.  But what frustrated me most was that I had no idea what had caused the problem.  Since it wasn’t showing in device manager, I couldn’t see what drivers it was needing (the latest downloads wouldn’t even seem to let me reinstall it at all). 

Needless to say, I worked on it long enough to let it frustrate me too much. There were inappropriate attitudes coming from me towards my tablet, hurtful (and unintended) actions towards my wife (spending so much time on it that she couldn’t actually eat her dinner in a timely fashion), and yes, unfortunately inappropriate language slipped my lips.

After calming down, I did apologize to Danielle for my actions and attitudes.  She was right when she reminded me it’s just a thing, and not worth getting that upset over.  She convinced me to stay away from it for awhile and just play with my son for a time to calm down.  And low and behold, she was right.  It worked.  I calmed down as that little bundle of joy cooed and babbled with me, let me read him a few books, giggled, spit up, and worked on his tummy time.  He’s getting so close to figuring out how to actually prop himself up.

I came back to the Surface around 11 pm, after they had gone to bed. I slowly decided to look through the even logs.  And this time, my wireless controller was showing in the device manager again, but still not connected.  The event log showed that the controller didn’t have the resources to start.  Okay, I have no idea why it wasn’t there and then suddenly was.  I was expecting it to have fried itself and never come back.  I’ve never seen this happen before, but I disabled both my VPN adapters (something I’ve never had to do), rebooted, and my wireless controller was working perfectly fine.

I’m writing this the following morning from the tablet, which is holding it’s wireless connection perfectly fine.  Perhaps the problems last night were just my guardian angel’s way of saying I needed to unplug for a bit, and go be a family man. Perhaps it is just coincidence and it’s all explained by actually technological gremlins.  Either way, I need to remember that tech is my job 8-5, M-F.  Outside of that, I need to be a family man; a father and a husband, who doesn’t get angry and frustrated so quickly.

I pray nightly when I put Levi to be that God gives me the wisdom and guidance to be the best father and husband that Dani and Levi deserve.  I’ll have to keep this little incident in the back of my mind from here on out as a reminder that they come first.