Computer Says No

The sheer horror was slow to dawn on me. I was looking at a laptop with a blank screen that should have been displaying gentle shades of blue and playing warming, cute peepy sounds to let me know I'd made the right choice in Microsoft.

But instead of lovely Windows 7.0, I've got a fritzed machine, an error somewhere in chipset land made all the more difficult to diagnose because it failed inconsistently before eventually going down with the finality of a fat drunk losing his legs.

This is why the shower head got replaced, the toilet seat repaired and the picture hung. I hadn't actually realised how much of my time the wee sucker was actually eating. Depositing the little slab of now-useless black plastic at the service and support centre this morning left me walking away feeling distinctly naked, I can tell you.

Yet, despite my black thoughts in the car on the way over to the office, my day hasn't been a disastrous void spent looking at a notebookless desk. I'm accessing my email using our remote access client, doing stuff in Google Groups and pulling the documents I need from the server. I got Twitter up and running on the spare machine I'm using and all my RSS stuff is on Netvibes. The same crash a few short years ago would have been a true horrow - everything I had was held on my local hard disk. Now a great deal of the stuff I work on is out there in 'the cloud' - accessible to me wherever I am, whatever machine I'm using. Device independent, platform independent and client indepenent.

I do realise the fact that I even paused to think about this, let alone wrote a post about it, makes me a deeply sad individual. But then I am temporarily bereft of my beloved Lenovo T61 and grief makes one inclined to behave oddly.