The butterfly effect?

What's that thing about the "butterfly effect?" You know, that thing about the butterfly in the jungle of Brazil that moves it's wings and sets of a series of events that leads to a tornado in Texas. Oh yeah, chaos theory.

So what is the relationship between a late night, a blue ink pen and a free battery for my iPod? Here's the story:

I came home late last night from a college basketball game in Boston. In my fatigue, I accidentally threw the t-shirt I was wearing into the laundry basket without remembering to take a blue ink pen out of my pocket. This noon, when I put the laundry into the washer, I neglected to notice the pen, and into the wash it went. The ink stained a blue oxford shirt, one of my favorites, and a white pillowcase. With a combination of anger, feelings of stupidity and hopefulness directed at the magic of chemicals, I brought the soiled clothes back into the kitchen and praying that some OxiClean (TM) and hot water would release the stains. But to do this correctly I needed a wash basin to let things soak.

Under the counters I went in search of the old wash basin that was of course in the very back of the bottom shelf of the most hard-to-reach cabinet. As I pulled out the basin, I noticed, crammed in the corner, a Best Buy receipt attached to an extended warranty. It was for my iPod, the one that was purchased in March of 2009. The extended warranty is good for two years.

Now the back story is that this same iPod Touch which I've used faithfully all this time as my PDA, has developed a weak, dying battery. It will not hold a charge for no more than 24 hours meaning I have to keep it plugging in most of the time; defeating the whole idea of it being a mobile device. But, according to my receipt, battery replacement is covered by the extended warranty.

I had completely forgotten about the extended warranty; something that probably brings pleasure to the Best Buy people. And I would never gave found it if I wasn't crawling around under the cabinets looking for the wash basin. You see, the receipt and the extended warranty had slipped out and fallen into the cabinet down below essentially disappearing until today.

I'll let you make know how I make out when I visit Best Buy tomorrow. Let's hope the butterfly does its thing.

Oh, and the OxiClean was able to remove the ink stains.
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By Nevit Dilmen (Photograph) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons