A month or two ago, the shell on Olof’s Nintendo DS Lite got broken, most likely after being dropped by one child or another. He took it in stride, because that’s just the kind of guy he is. Also, it was nearly two years old and he’d more than gotten his money’s worth out of it. Still, it was a blow — he used it every day, and the kids used it most days as well, so they definitely felt the loss.

Actually, because the kids played it so much and because the screen was showing more than a little wear, I had been planning for a little while to surprise him with a new one. Then he could pass the first one down to the kids, and avoid having to compete so much with them for his own game. The aforementioned breakage threw a wrench into those plans.

As luck would have it, he discovered that the inner works weren’t damaged, and after couple of weeks he found a place online to buy a replacement shell. Less lucky was that changing the shells looked to be pretty tricky, and since it’s not actually a Nintendo product, he couldn’t send it in to them to handle. After debating with himself for a day or two, he ordered one and received it a couple of days later. And for the past two weeks, both the broken console and the shiny new shell have been sitting unattended on a shelf in his office, the man himself not daring to attempt the switch, for fear of doing irrevocable damage.

He wanted to wait to get a new one until he had fixed the old one so that he wouldn’t have to share with the kids, but today I got tired of waiting and picked one up when I was in town on my own. I think he was glad to have it, finally, and he set to work almost immediately on the old one. When he got it taken apart, however, he found that the super-special screwdriver he’d bought with the new case really wasn’t all that was needed to get the thing back together again, and now we’ve got a whole mess of teeny, tiny, infinitely scatter-able parts on the shelf where once there were a disabled-but-whole DS Lite and a shiny new shell. Alas.