Welcome back, I hope the withdrawl symptoms weren't too severe.
Pretty typical though, hardware will always fail when it's most inconvenient or when replacement parts aren't immediately available.
We lost the primary SCSI drive on a small web server we have running here at the house, over July 4th holiday weekend a couple of years ago. Had to wait 3 days to get a new one. We didn't know that CompUSA, BestBuy etc. had quit stocking SCSI drives.