Last night, I came home and booted my Kubuntu box as I usually do. About five minutes into checking my email, my beloved and enormous CRT monitor went black. I tried Alt+F’ing to a command line, thinking it was an X issue, but I couldn’t get anything on the monitor. So, I tried a reboot—no luck. All I had was a blank and black screen, yet the little green light on the monitor was telling me that the monitor seemed to be getting a signal. I tried the monitor on another Ubuntu box I keep lying around. Nothing. Blackness as dark as my soul at that thin, bleak moment, faced with the prospect of getting through the night deprived of that warm and lovely cathode glow.

At this point I fell back upon the time honored and trusted method of hardware repair known as “Smacking the Shit Out of Your Gear”. I began placing several surgical and precise whompings along the sides of the monitor casing. My inner caveman assured me that he knew what he was doing.

Suddenly, while in the midst of whacking, there came a loud pop from the guts of my monitor and a curl of smoke drifted out of the vents in the back. The damn thing was dead. I told myself that my whacking was a mercy killing, rather than the coup de grâce.

I now have a schmancy flatpanel LCD. My lovely cathode ray tan is starting to fade. I miss my old monitor.