Learning the hard way at BrianJBecker.com

In the past couple of days I’ve learned a couple of little lessons the hard way:

My kind Malawian military friends give me extra provisions from their camp. Included are a few bags of pudding mix and the chocolate one had a small hole in it. I transferred it to another container and there was some that wouldn’t fit. Perfect opportunity to whip up some pudding, no? The instructions were for making enough pudding for a platoon, so rather than crunching the numbers I just eyeballed it. It was all going fine until the mixture hit the temperature where the agent that congeals the stuff kicked in. I went right past pudding to something like rubber.

Lesson: Don’t play around with pudding, do the math. Or at least remember that there’s never very much powder in the little boxes that Bill Cosby sells.

Last night I remembered that the notebook computer I recently received for work came with a small surge protector. This is a good thing for those of us who don’t enjoy the idea of our computers burning down. I went and got the protector from my desk and tried plugging it into a new powerstrip I bought in Kinshasa. There was a loud SNAP! simultaneous with some impressive sparks. I drew back, but what next? I tried again to the same result. Before Congo there’s no WAY I would give something like that a second attempt, but stuff pops, sparks, and smokes here all the time. I recently saw the AC adapter for a friend’s external hard drive burn out and leave a puddle of juice on the floor. Also, most computer accessories are dual voltage. Awhile back, my computer guy bought a wireless router from me that had stopped working for the fifth time. He was tired of fixing some minor configuration problem in it for me so I sold it to him so he could promptly fix it and sell it. He told me later that when showing it to a possible customer, he plugged it in and POW blew out the adapter. That sale wasn’t accomplished.