Laptop, you're fired.

A few years ago I was at Austin Java (a wonderful little coffeeshop) with two good friends of mine. We were meeting about a pet project that we were involved in – bridging the digital divide between the U.S. and Latin America. Well low and behold during our meeting a guy walks in with a desktop. I’m not kidding! An old iMac circa 2000. We laughed uproariously… 1) because it was a desktop and who bothers to unplug a desktop at home and drag it to a coffeeshop? And 2) we were all on our shiny Macbooks hence an outdated iMac was humorous. (Yes, we’re snobs.)

You see I love computers. Keep your fancy smart phones, flat screen TV’s, and GPS’s. This girl is completely content with a shiny, good working computer and reliable internet. Ok, I admit it. I have an unhealthy attachment to my computer. It doesn’t help that I formerly lived in a city, Austin, that did not rectify this problem but rather embraced this bad habit. See above.

Well friends, my laptop that I’ve been using this entire summer for my school project – for the sake of anonymity let’s just say this brand sort of rhymes with Smells ® -- has decided that it is going on strike and will not power on. It’s last words were 0110010101110100 001000000111010001110101 00100000011000100111001001110101011101000110010100111111 (if you don’t know what this means look it up) I was on the phone with the support team of Smells ® for about an hour last week to see if they could fix it. Oddly enough my phone call got routed to Latin America and the operator at Smells ® could barely understand me. It was quite comical. I don’t know how many times I had to spell my email address out… but it was at least 10 times. And folks my email address is long! Ug…

So I’ve resorted to using what I like to call my “vintage laptop” ummmm a spiral notebook. When I try to push its buttons, though, nothing happens. No weather updates, no interesting news articles, no NPR goodies, and no updates on what some random friend ate for lunch on Facebook. What the??? In a word, my vintage laptop is: useless. But to be fair it has straight blue lines in it in which to guide my pen, always is willing to work, and has an appealing pink cover. So in another word, my spiral notebook is: reliable.

There were many thoughts of acting out the therapeutic Office Space scenes out on my Smells ® computer. Oh Michael Bolton and Samir, I totally feel your pain. Anybody know where to get a bat in the Caribbean?