We're sure that those who have been awaiting the new Viewer Mail segment that was promised for Saturday afternoon (all six of you) have been wondering why, as of Monday night, the AtAT staff hadn't even broadcast a feeble excuse for its delay. Well, viewers wondering about AtAT's mysterious radio silence since Friday night need wonder no more. Gather around the fire, kiddies, and the AtAT staff will regale you with a harrowing tale of panic at 30,000 feet, and our miraculous delivery from perdition just in time for the holiday. (Hey, every other show gets to do a Christmas episode, so let us have our fun, okay?)

Obsessive fans of our little soap opera are aware that, more often than not, we broadcast new Viewer Mail segments every Friday night. Occasionally circumstances force us to delay our broadcast until Saturday morning or afternoon, and this weekend was one such occasion; since we were catching a shockingly early 6:13 AM flight to Chicago on Saturday morning, it was imperative that we spent Friday night preparing the AtAT PowerBook for its first stint in the field as a mobile production unit, thus ensuring that the show could go on even over the holidays. And so, at about 2 AM, our PowerBook was packed to the hilt with AtATy goodness and we went to bed for that all-important two hours of sleep, with visions of Apple AC adapters dancing in our heads.

At four we arose from fitful dreams, jumped through some incredible hoops to secure a cab to the airport, fought the crowds (even at that ungodly hour), checked in, and boarded the plane. We dozed lightly until we were well airborne and the captain informed us that it was safe to operate our portable electronic devices, and then pulled the PowerBook from its storage space underneath the seat in front of us, intending to finish Viewer Mail in the air so that it would be ready for broadcast once we reached our hotel. We powered it up, and... nothing. Actually, let's qualify that "nothing." The system we had so diligently configured and tested mere hours before now would produce a startup chime, a happy Mac, and then an endless duration of absolutely zippo.

No problem, we thought, as we pulled our trusty Mac OS 9 CD-ROM from a carry-on bag. No need to panic while we've still got an alternate method of booting; we'll just install a minty-fresh copy of the operating system and everything will be splefty again. We popped the disk into the DVD-ROM drive, restarted with the "C" key held down, and... once again, nothing: the startup chime, the smiley Mac, and a Beckettesque sense of existentialist despair as the seconds ticked on and absolutely nothing happened.

The usual arsenal of troubleshooting tactics ensued, including zapping the PRAM, resetting the Power Manager, starting up with the DVD-ROM module removed, etc., all to no avail. Once we landed and made it to the hotel, we even resorted to such desperate measures as yanking the third-party RAM module from the system, but no matter what we tried, we simply could not get past the smiley Mac, whether booting from the internal disk or (and this was the part that really had us sweating) our Mac OS 9 CD. The ominous phrase "Logic Board Failure" teetered dangerously at the edge of our sanity, threatening to turn our White Christmas into a Men In White Coats Christmas instead.

Our sleep-deprived brains worked feverishly to concoct all manner of harebrained "I Love Lucy" schemes to keep AtAT running as at least a shadow of its usual self. We could steal the iBook from Jack's freshly-parental cousin for a week; with an eight-pound baby in the house monopolizing her time, odds are she'd never even miss the six-and-a-half-pound Blueberry laptop at all. Or we could (and remember, we were sleep-deprived and panicked at this point) run out and buy a $799 iMac to use in the hotel room for a week, and then give it as a late Christmas present to some deserving relative who would be thrilled to reap the rewards of our dire misfortune. Do you see what lengths to which we're willing to go just to keep you, our viewing audience, entertained and content?

First, though, we decided to call Apple's tech support line, since it was easier than braving the throngs of last-minute shoppers to secure a new iMac and we were too tired to plan and execute a successful covert iBooknapping from a residence roughly an hour away by car. After a very brief time spent on hold, we detailed our symptoms to the charming gentleman on the other end of the line, and ran down the list of all the steps we'd taken to resolve the problem so far. We voiced our concern that since the same behavior occurred whether we booted from the hard disk or the Mac OS 9 CD, we might have a far more serious situation on our hands than just a simple case of System corruption. It was at that point that the heavens parted, a choir of angels sang, and Apple's wonderful tech support department reminded us of a crucial fact that, in our sleep-deprived state, we had totally forgotten: there was no way, no how that our Mac OS 9.0 CD was ever be able to boot our Mac OS 9.0.4-requiring PowerBook.

Of course! In our pre-holiday travel frenzy, we had utterly failed to replace our Mac OS 9 CD (which was a perfect emergency boot disk when we traveled with our iBook) with the system CD-ROMs that shipped with our PowerBook! Suddenly despair was replaced with a glimmer of hope, as we realized that our beloved PowerBook wasn't freezing while booting from CD at all-- it was rejecting the CD as unbootable, and then defaulting to the internal drive, and freezing just as if we had booted from the hard disk int he first place.

The Apple technician apologized that there was nothing else he could do for us, since we didn't have our system disks at the ready, but we assured him that he had done plenty. At that point we set about a frantic but optimistic search for some way to get a hold of a FireWire PowerBook system CD. We could borrow Jack's cousin's iBook and broadcast an SOS over AtAT, begging any Chicago-area owners of that magic disk to give us a call. We soon bailed on that idea as difficult (remember, the iBook was an hour away) and unlikely to succeed (because what are the odds that one of our six weekend viewers actually lives in Chicago and owns a Pismo?). What about a store? Could we possibly locate, say, a nearby CompUSA with at least one Mac-friendly salesperson on staff, and somehow persuade him/her to loan us a Pismo system disk for half an hour while we performed a clean 9.0.4 install on our ailing Bronze buddy? Or better yet, how about a small local Apple-authorized reseller, who might be more willing to help us in our hour of need?

This is the part where we got to feel like Batman and James Bond rolled into one. Out came the magic Visor and the blessed OmniSky wireless modem. Soon we were blazing along at 19.2 kbps and surfing Apple's site on a 160x160 screen, searching for local service providers. Say what you will about the current primitive state of wireless 'net access; in a situation like this one, it seemed nothing short of miraculous. There we were, almost a thousand miles from home, and we had just searched Apple's database and retrieved a list of nearby service providers, all without the use of a phone line and on a teeny little organizer-thingy. Ah, the wonders of the age in which we live!

Back to the hunt. Calls to the first few small stores were fruitless, and a call to CompUSA proved to be a baffling phone-tree ordeal. That was when we noticed a listing for a Micro Center about ten miles away. Now, back in Boston, Micro Center is the place to go for Mac stuff if you're going the largish-chain, superstore route. So we called them up and spoke to someone in the service department about the possibility of borrowing a system disk for a few minutes, just to do a clean install of Mac OS 9.0.4. The first guy we talked to insisted that there was absolutely nothing they could do, but eventually this grumpy gentleman passed the phone to "somebody who knows something about the Macs." And thus began our first contact with Brian, the Tech Who Saved Christmas.

Brian, you see, was indeed Mac-savvy, and as we explained our situation, we could almost hear him nodding sagely ten miles away. Once he had digested the salient points of our disaster, he cheerily told us that while he didn't have a PowerBook system disk we could borrow, he would be able to reload our operating system from a special Apple Service bootable 9.0.4 CD, for a standard Micro Center fee of $50. That sounded good to us, except for one thing: the last time we brought a PowerBook into Micro Center for service, it took roughly a week just for them to replace the defective battery, simply because of all the other dead and dying computers in line ahead of our little Duo. And so we asked how long it might take before we could actually get the work done.

Imagine our surprise and delight when Saint Brian said, "Well, it's Christmas, so if you bring it in tonight, I'll do it while you wait." Brian, the patron saint of line jumpers, of cuts, of frontsies and backsies! Since we were desperate for a quick resolution, the man was offering to let us jump the queue for immediate service-- and don't think for a second that it was because the store didn't have any other work lined up, because we saw that workbench. Brian was definitely doing us a holiday favor in the spirit of the season. After the lovable little elf told us that Micro Center would be open until 9PM, we packed up our poor sick 'Book, invoked the miracle of OmniSky once more for driving directions to the store, piled into the rental, and headed out.

To make an unreasonably long story infinitesimally shorter, our trip to the store was uneventful, and Brian was waiting when we got there. He checked our PowerBook into the repair system (we got a cool bar code label as a souvenir) and even let us back into the repair room to watch, since we were so worried about our baby. Attempts to install a new System Folder on our Mac OS 9 partition just weren't going very well, so in the interests of speed and practicality we wiped our Mac OS X public beta partition clean and Brian installed Mac OS 9.0.4 on that instead. By the time we left that night, we were $50 poorer, but in possession of a bootable PowerBook and the knowledge that, yes, Virginia, there are some great techs out there willing to go the extra mile. So here's a shout out to Brian, who bent the rules just a teensy bit to get us Mac-enabled in time for the holiday.

Since then, we've been working to get our PowerBook's tabula rasa System Folder back into an AtAT-friendly state, while also juggling familial responsibilities and related holiday activities; the net effect, of course, is that Viewer Mail still isn't done, but at least you've all gotten to hear the uplifting saga of our successful quest for the "Welcome to Macintosh" message. And since what goes around comes around, it's fitting that the very next day, we encountered a poor guy whose car was very stuck ("wedged" is probably a more appropriate word) in some of Chicago's recent voluminous snowfall. In the interest of karma and the holiday spirit that Brian had so embodied, Jack got soaked, dirty, and very nearly ruptured something pushing this guy's car out of the snowy ditch-- but push it out he did, thus making someone else's Christmas just a little bit more merry. It's another Festivus miracle!