My Notebook Left Me
My laptop left me. She left me without warning. One day, she was behaving like nothing was wrong between us. We were sitting on a picnic bench in the shade on a beautiful summer day. I was typing away. Her hard drive hummed, chuckled every now and again, and faithfully recorded my data and shut down when our date under the tree was over. That night, I tried to boot her up, but there was no boot. There was nothing. We were through.
I can remember the first day she arrived at my door in the big brown box. I stayed up all night with her on that first day. I loved her immediately. After all, she had that big 14-inch screen with a 233 MHz processor, 32MB RAM, and enough hard drive space to hold WordPerfect, Photoshop, and PageMaker. Laughable specs for a laptop these days, but love is blind. A humble grad student couldn’t ask for a better companion during long days and even longer nights in the library stacks.
I can remember the next day, bleary-eyed and exhausted, I dared to go online. It was terrifying, those first screeches and sirens from the modem, but she cruised almost as fast as those clunky desktops at the school computer lab. Now I just didn’t love her for her components. I was in love with her, and she was all mine.
And now she is gone. I can’t help but think she took the easy way out, and that makes me mad. Or maybe she had had enough of all the time I recently spent with my girlfriend’s younger laptop. That makes me feel guilty. Or maybe, somehow, she left me for a reason. Maybe there is meaning in all this loss. Maybe it means I’m supposed to move on, to a new laptop, with a Sonoma chipset, an NVidia GeForce 6800, 120GB hard drive?
Related article:
Tuesday, August 16, 2005
By Matthew Brodsky