Has anyone had any bad/scarring amiga-related experiences?

[ElPolloDiabl]

Yep, my floppy drive died on my A500 and the certified service center charged $200 for a replacement floppy and $100 to install it. (Less than 10 minutes work).
Since then if something breaks, I replace it myself.

[Daedalus]

Well, are you guys sure you're looking at the "It's me or them" thing the right way? I mean, it's not that anyone would stop you from owning your property, but it's if you spend more time on Aminet than talking to her, no wonder she'd be pi$$ed.

Having said that, maybe I'm just very lucky - I have 4 towers under my desk (will possibly be 5 when the X1000 arrives), plus another two A1200s. The girlfriend really doesn't have any interest in them at all, but she's perfectly happy to let me work away


Back on topic, years ago (Christ, about 13 years now!) I was using an A600 as the basis for a room automation system and managed to pass mains electricity (230V) through the shielding and ground plane. Needless to say I feared the worst, but turned it off and on again (after fixing the bad wiring!) and it was fine! Still works to this day!

[Ral-Clan]

Well, in 2008 something finally went wrong with my stocked to the max A2000.  It killed the A2091 card and the very hard to find GURU-ROM that was on it.  That was a key component to my system, cured the DMA problem with RAM transfers to my 68040 card.  So when it went, I knew it would just be way too hard and expensive to track down another one.  I upgraded to WinUAE on a fast Pentium CPU and I can get twice the work done in half the time (I am mainly an Amiga apps user not a gamer) so everything runs great.  I keep real Amigas around though for the day I'll get the bug for nostalgic hardware.

But that's not the tramautic story - since I knew it was only a matter of time for that cobbled together jumble of hardware to fail.  It was frustrating, but I was resigned to the fact it would happen.

The only semi-traumatic experience I had was one time when I was considering buying a used 68060 accelerator from someone in the US (I am in Canada).  I wasn't sure it would work on my older revision A2000 motherboard, but the fellow Amigan was nice enough to ship it to me for testing.

I forgot to tell him two things:

1) DON'T use a courier for cross-border items (they charge import brokerage fees).

2) DON'T claim it at full value on the customs declaration form, instead, check it off as a gift of "sample of merchandise".

The package arrived at my house via UPS.  I was not home and my wife signed for it.

There was a $50 cross border brokerage fee charged by UPS just for taking it across the border (the regular postal service doesn't charge this).

There was a $75 dollar Canada Customs import fee (based on the declared value of $500US for the hardware).

There was another $25 in shipping fees on top of that for various "services".

Total: $150 just to get it into the country, which my wife, unknowingly, paid in cash at the door on my behalf (so I owed her).  If I had been there when it had arrived and been told I owed $150, I would have refused the package and just had it returned to sender.

It wasn't the sender's fault - as he didn't have much experience shipping to Canada.  In fact - I think he's here on Amiga.org (hi!).  Nice guy - he felt bad about it - and it's a funny story to laugh about now.

It turned out the accelerator had compatibility issues with my Amiga and I couldn't use it...so I also paid return shipping on top of that.