This semester, I’m taking a six-week intensive class, and I have a standing date with my parents on Sunday afternoons. Friday is usually game night. I was looking forward to it tonight.

I’ve been working on my MacBook at work a lot and was in the middle of working on a presentation when OS X started acting weird. I’d get little freezes and lockups, even though my processor and memory utilization were low. It felt like I was getting hard lockups every 10 min or so.

Since the Mac was in an unresponsive state, I hit the power button. Usually, OS X springs back to life and everything is wonderful. This time, it took forever to clear the startup gray screen and it hung at the blue screen, alternating showing a gray spinning wheel and not. Trying the usual suspects did nothing. I reset the PMY, NVRAM, and tried a safe boot. No joy. I was able to boot into my Windows 7 partition so I knew it wasn’t likely a hardware fault. A quick Google showed this wasn’t uncommon, and an Archive and Reinstall usually fixed it.

The problem was game night, and my on going belief that Murphy has a sense of humor. If I didn’t go to game night, I’d come home and the reinstall would work. If I went, tomorrow it’d be a nightmare of a reinstall, and I’d probably end up at the Apple Store on a Saturday. So, I sent my regrets.

Naturally, the reinstall went fairly well. There were a few post-install issues, but for the most part everything worked well. I just wish I could have made game night.