The Palm Graveyard

TombStone

A Tale of Two Taxis

Victim: Ian Darwin
Date added: 8/20/2002

 

Taxis have been the downfall of not one but TWO of my pda's.

First was a very old Sharp PC-3000, a wonderful little PC-XT-type PDA. Sadly Sharp never came out with 386 or higher versions of this puppy; rumor has it there was a fight between the Calculator division of Sharp and their Computer division and, as usual, the consumers lost. But I digress.

One day I was in a hurry to get into a taxi and, moving too fast, crashed my hip against the tail fin of the vehicle. You know the rest - a destroyed LCD panel. The machine still worked, but it was VERY hard to read since you could only see about 1/4 of the screen. There's a reason they are called Liquid Crystal Display - break 'em and the liquid crystals leak out.

The second was more banal. An early Palm V, in an early official Palm V belt case - the one with a slide-on (and slide-off) clip instead of the modern wraparound belt clip. The taxi arrived at the Eaton Center. I got out of the taxi; my Palm either didn't, or went into the gutter or sidewalk. The cab driver swore he never saw it. Nobody turned it in, despite my name tag. Maybe an auto wrecker will find it in a few years when he pulls the back seat out of a wrecked or driven-out taxi. Or maybe somebody's getting good use out of it.

I contemplated suing Palm for selling such a crappy case, but thought the better of it, on the grounds that you have no right to sue when you use something that you can see (even if in some cases only in hindsight) is JPS (Just Plain Stupid). I replaced it with a cheap Palm III from eBay and a new-style official Palm case with a proper belt clip.

In both cases, all the data were backed up onto my main PC. In the one case via a memory card. Thank goodness for Palm HotSync!

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