Satan welcomed him. "Great to see you. I've got a great offer for you. You fix just one piece of my broken equipment, and I'll get you shipped to Heaven."

He led the engineer to a beautiful lab with plenty of bench space, power outlets, state of the art tools and shelves of components.

"Just one thing," says the devil. "All of the parts are mislabeled, and the equipment has intermittent faults."

Which gets me to my phone, which started not connecting via USB last week. Not all the time, just once in a while.

Obviously, a flaky USB cable. As one of my old co-workers put it, "A cable is a busted thing that connects two other busted things."

He was a bit of an optimist.

I swapped around cables, and sometimes it worked, and sometimes it didn't.

I finally bought a cable tester and confirmed that all my cables were actually good.

So, the problem was the phone or the car. I rather hoped it would turn out to be the phone. Much easier to replace.

The phone seemed to fail reliably if the battery was fully charged. I checked online, and there has been an issue with the phone refusing all connectivity if it can't accept a charge.

I twiddled with settings so that wasn't an issue, and sometimes it worked.

Long ago, I happily reported to my boss, "You know that equipment that's been breaking down once in a while. Well, it's no longer intermittent!"

For him, this meant that we were losing the income from the half-time it was working.

For me, that meant I could finally fix the thing.

That's why engineers shouldn't work with bosses.

This week, the phone's intermittent issue stopped being intermittent.

That meant I could stop trying to fix the phone and get a new one.

This weekend was OVFF in Ohio and I needed a phone that would reliably hook up to the car and tell me where to go.

After a few updates and reboots, the new phone is happy and the trip to OVFF went without any glitches. I sang, talked and listened a lot, and slept and ate enough to keep talking, singing and listening.

One of my activities at OVFF was an interview with Bowling Green U for their filk music archives. They are interviewing some of the long-time filkers to get times and dates and funny tales from the history of filking.

I'm not Elrond and I can't quite say "I was There," but I was part of the second wave of filking, and I can always tell a tall tale or two.