In the kitchen on Friday I reached to the back of the fridge and the inner light went out. I assumed it was dead. In the mean time the house's RCD had tripped, so I moved the fridge to unplug it before resetting the RCD. No joy - the RCD kept tripping out. So I unplug everything in the kitchen (which has it's own ring) and it's still tripping.

Then I realised what had happened. A couple of minutes before I'd mopped up a spillage after one of the kids knocked over a jar of olives on the kitchen worktop. The "brine" from which had trickled down the back of the worktop and in to an electrical socket beneath. Ten minutes with a hair dryer on it and everything's back up and running.

Meanwhile, out in the office, this series of 5 or so power outages in the space of half an hour was more than my Mac Mini could handle and it was now refusing to start. Only after a PMU reset could I get it to boot and - when it finally did - the fan was running full speed making it way too noisy to serve its primary purpose as an iTunes jukebox.

To add to my stress levels the laptop needed a hard reboot as well (the docking station doesn't like losing power) and it too refused to boot following this. Only after a couple of attempts did it finally boot. All this at the same time I'm in an email exchange with a customer I'm trying to fix a "top priority" bug for. Needless to say I was a bit stressed out.

To make sure this never happens again I did two things:

1. Sealed around the edge of the electrical socket in question with some decorator's caulk.
2. Made sure the docking station and Mac Mini were supplied by one of the two UPS units in the office.

Everything in my office is now running with a backup power supply!

From what I can gather on the forums the noisy fan issue is not un-common on Mac Minis and there's no known fix. I'm now on the market for a Mac!

On the plus side, at least I don't need a new fridge. I'd much rather be buying a new Mac than a boring old fridge any day. I "needed" a new Mac anyway...