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2: The Laptop Story

I was all ready to leave when my roommate blew up my laptop. Actually that’s not true, it was the night before I left, but in the hurry of leaving it feels like right before.

I only use the thing when I travel, and every time I wonder if it is worth owning, but never doing anything about it. I wasn’t nearly as distraught as I would have expected—maybe I was waiting for something to happen to it.

The scene went something like this: I was in the kitchen doing something other than packing, starting to feel the panic of needing to leave and not being ready. Lala calls my name with more than the normal amount of urgency. As I walk into the hall she’s on the phone with Em saying what’s happened. We hear a boom, and a second later, the clunk of my laptop hitting the floor.

With an “Oh my god.” Lala starts down the hall towards the front room. My laptop was on fire sitting off the edge of the carpet on the hardwoods in front of the gas heater with flames coming up around the back corner, through the keyboard. The explosion from the hall was the sound of one of the lithium ion cells in the battery exploding and propelling the laptop off the heater and onto the floor. I start stomping out the flames when a second cell explodes. It was quite a sight with sparks flying a few feet into the air, a nasty smell, and the hissing of fireworks. Run, get water and a plate, put the battery on the plate, dowse, smother the rest of the flames, and survey the damage.

During the clean up Lala starts talking bout how grateful she is that I was home, which at the time feels like pandering, and how sorry she is that she turned on the heater with my laptop sitting on it. In retrospect I still don’t understand how a person’s first instinct in that situation is to call the presumed owner instead of trying to put out the fire. Anyway, it was stupid of me to put the laptop on the heater (even if for a short time) assuming that no one would blindly turn it on.

Lala has graciously offered to give me some money, but I don’t know what to say. How much of it is my fault? And how does one value a defunct model laptop (I can only find one for sale online for way more than I paid for it 7 years ago).

So far on this trip I’ve frequently felt the pinch of not having it, so guess I’ll have to replace it with something. My friend J. has graciously lent me an iPad to use in it’s place, for which I am eternally grateful. I can, at least, check email (over SSH), watch things on the plane (he was kind enough to load it with some things, though not the selected library that was (is?) on my laptop), and use a web browser. (I don’t think I’ll replace the laptop with an iPad of my own, though—there are too many things I want it to do, that the hardware is capable of, that the OS doesn’t allow. I’ve been spoilt by that old Linux laptop (maybe I should just get over it and accept a crippled machine). (Bracing for all the zealous Apple people trying to jump down my throat asking what, exactly?, let me at least give you a short list: be able to load media from a thumb drive or the web, upload pictures I’ve taken to my server, keep all the media and personal information in an encrypted file system so I don’t have to worry it getting lost, stolen, or seized (at a border), use vim, and a bunch of other things that I’m sure normal people don’t think about doing).)

Anyway, that’s that.