I am a Computer Murderer

I am always the girl with the Computer Drama.  In undergrad at UNC, they talked us all into buying IBM Thinkpads, and told us horror stories about how if we didn't get THAT PARTICULAR ONE, that nothing would work with the UNC network, that we would be lost and helpless sans tech support, and basically that evil gremlins would come out of your Mac, Dell, HP, whatever and attack you in your dorm room. 

I talked my parents into getting me the big super-deluxe model with the fingerprint swiper instead of the regular log-in screen....whiiiiich pretty much never worked.  And it was fine for awhile until the big terrible moment when it started acting slow, I took it IT services and dropped it off and then got a voicemail saying, "Uh, hey, this is Justin from ITS...if there's anything important on this computer, you should call us, because your hard drive is junk." 

I still dragged the IBM dinosaur with me when I started law school, and it would sit there and whine like it was going into orbit while I tried to take notes on it.  There's dead silence in the room while the professor asks a question no one knows the answer to and everyone is desperately trying to be invisible (me most of all), and my computer is going, "EEEEEEEEEEEEE," like I'm blowing a dog whistle.

So when the IBM went from whining and being embarrassing to just not really booting up anymore, I decided it was time for a new laptop.  PB was still in the I-hate-Macs-because-they're-stupid-and-gimmicky-and-overpriced camp, and he talked me out of getting one.  I got a Sony Vaio instead, and it was fine for the first two weeks.

Fine until The Incident of the Palmetto Bug.  I have spoken often of these, I know.  But I swear I still have PTSD from living in a house full of them for a whole school year.  In fact, one night, in the throes of my first semester of law school stress, one of them dropped off the ceiling and ONTO ME.  I had my giant casebooks spread out all over the couch and my brand new, week-old laptop on my lap.  Nearly dying because there was a giant roach on my leg, making his way toward my pajama shorts, I jumped up from the couch, screamed bloody murder, and tried to set the computer down on the floor, rather than throwing it across the room.  But in such a state, I only got the computer about six inches above the ground before I just dropped it, and it was over. 

After I spent 20 minutes trying to chase the big nasty thing out from under the couch to kill it, I went back to my computer to watch the whole screen slowly freeze and then fade to black, like Leo DiCaprio's face fades away into the ocean at the end of Titanic.  Thankfully, I took it back to the store and got a new computer, a replacement identical Sony Vaio. 

So that's the trilogy of my laptop usage, until this morning.  I woke up, turned my computer on to get my reading assignment for the day, and this is what I was greeted by:

Sigh.  Hard drive busted again.  You'd think I beat my computers with a hammer or used them for target practice. For now, I'm using my dad's laptop that we got him for his birthday in April with the hopes he'd figure out how to use it, which, well, hasn't quite happened yet.  What I really, really want is a shiny new MacBook.  What I really, really need is approximately one million dollars in the bank.  Sooooo, long story short, I don't think either of those will be happening anytime soon.  Compaq netbook it is!