I’m currently trying to sell/buy a house. Because of this, I’ve probably walked through twenty or so different houses trying to find one I like. I’m sure you’ve done a similar thing when looking for a place to live. It’s just common sense: don’t buy anything blind. That’s why you look at the house, have it inspected, and so on. No one buys a car after just looking at it. You take it for a test drive, right? It’s a sound principle of responsible shopping, right? Of course it is…but even sound principles can be rocked from time to time.
In the Year 2004
The year was 2004, and I was headed to a youth leadership conference. I wanted a cool way to take notes at this conference, and paper just wasn’t cutting it anymore. I couldn’t take a smartphone because, as I said, it was 2004, and I wasn’t a top-level executive or a lawyer (I’m pretty sure that BlackBerry wouldn’t sell a phone to a “regular person” until 2006). That left me with one option: a laptop. The problem? I didn’t have one. The solution: a friend of mine had one that he wanted to sell!
It was a G3 “Clamshell” iBook, and it was sweet, even if it was four years old. Best part, my friend only wanted a hundred dollars for the iBook. At the time, I was in college, and money was scarce. However, I was quickly approaching my senior year and wanted a laptop to help me work on my senior essay. I decided that the best thing to do was to “test drive” the iBook at the conference.
That’s where this story takes a terrible turn. See, I didn’t have a laptop bag, just an unpadded messenger bag. No big deal, right? Wrong. Very big deal.
#BOOM!
I’m a pretty clumsy person, and I’m huge at the same time. Not easy to be a clumsy giant in a land built for regular people. This has lead to numerous semi-humrous, semi-painful stories. In this case, it’s just painful.
We made it to the conference and were having a great time. The laptop was serving its purpose nicely. We had just returned to the auditorium from a meal, and I was in a large group of people walking down the stairs toward my seat.
Did I mention that I wear size 14-wide shoes? Yeah, I’m literally a bigfoot. Sadly, only half my foot could fit on these stairs, and it is with this that I must admit, I fell backwards
On my messenger bag.
Containing the iBook.
My face fell instantly, knowing that I’d destroyed this computer. Fortunately, the case was intake. The screen wasn’t physically cracked, but my heart was metaphorically spider-webbed as I saw the huge line of dead pixels running diagonally across the screen. It was so bad that the Mac OS face looked more like Two-Face than ever before.
Of course, I didn’t even consider giving it back broken. I bought it, but my friend offered me an incredible deal. And not to sound too much like an Apple advert, but that iBook still worked fine for years! Of course, I just had to learn a new method of typing/scrolling so that I kept my work out of the “dead zone,” but oh well.
Do you have a tech wreck?
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