(Rest in peace, my old companion. The Macbook in better days.)

Well, that is what it was, technically, even if the catastrophe actually just meant that I had to fire up the Mac Mini in the guest bedroom where Betty and Bill’s earthly remains look down on me in benign silence.

Still can’t believe that, BTW, a process that lurches from crisis to sudden stillness, bypassing the intermediate steps from Alpha right to Omega. The numbing after-life process- procuring and submitting certificates of departure and insurance claims and Court documents- is a bit of a consolation, as though they were still around.

Mary Margaret lost her Dad not long after Bill and Betty left, he having the same affliction as Bill, so the vibes around Big Pink were pretty somber when she got back from the funeral up in Massachusetts. We have yet to deal with that, and I need to get that on the list of things to do. But enough of that.

Friday night is when I blew up the old MacBook. It has been a faithful device, best laptop I have had. Expensive, yes, and I keep seeing the Toshibas flacking new and lower prices, and Microsoft has rolled out that System Seven thing that is supposed to be not as aggressively stupid as all their other releases since Windows 3.1. That was the last one I really understood.

It might have been a “best value” choice to go back to Bill Gates Evil Empire, but the loss of Mr. Steve Jobs is still too fresh to turn my coat. Plus, it was my fault.

I well recall the glass of wine that teetered and flushed a perfectly good glass of red over the keyboard of my IBM Thnkpad, ending the life of the box that had served me well in my gypsy days. It was a nice piece of work, that box, and I replaced it with another, just as the Chinese bought the division from Big Blue, and rechristened it Lenovo or something.

(IBM T22 laptop, circa 2003, now a creature of the PRC.)

I won’t go back to the PRC for my personal computing needs, that goes without saying, and the next Thinkpad developed cracks around the hinge to the screen, which crackled one evening and blinked out.

It still worked fine, hooked up to a stand-alone monitor, but I figured that sort of defeated the whole purpose of having a laptop in the first place, and the box had to go. I wandered over to the Best Buy in Pentagon City and bought a really cool looking Toshiba Satellite with a 17-inch screen, and that was a pretty slick rig,  nice keyboard action and great display. However, the DVD drive failed fairly quickly, and the big screen meant the thing barely fit in my briefcase.

I really should attribute my alienation with that box to the awful Microsoft operating system- I think it went Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, 2000 Pro, XP and now Windows System 7, with the five in the middle being just plain irritating, vulnerable and clunky.

So, with the Toshiba dying, I took the plunge and recycled the old peripherals into the clinically cool Mac Mini, which I set up in the spare bedroom and began the process of becoming one of those loony Mac people.

I still needed a laptop, and Lucent Technologies and IBM were kind enough to provide company laptops, which made me a little uncomfortable. I mean, there are some things that the company really doesn’t need to have on the hard drive that has to be returned to them, and I have abandoned the idea that superceded personal computing equipment should be recycled. I think the hard drives are best dealt with by removal and physical destruction with a really big mallet, but that is a matter of personal preference.

There is a problem with Macbook, though it is one of esthetics rather than performance.

My young Associate visited last summer, and the first thing she did was get out some baby wipes and attack the laptop with some old fashioned elbow grease.

The serene white surfaces have a distressing tendency to build up ugly discoloration from the palms of the hands, working away, and the screens likewise pick up all manner of disturbing effluvia.  She managed to make the Macbook look a little less disgusting, ad Friday night, returning from Willow, I noticed just how bad the laptop looked, as if Mr. Jobs had devised an electronic appliance that was slowly accumulating enough of my DNA to walk off by itself, superceding me altogether.

I thought I did a neat job with minimal moisture, and the computer looked positively pristine. I resisted the temptation to turn it on that evening, but managed to fry the box anyway the next morning in an elegant slow-motion disintegration that commenced with the number keys going inoperable, followed by an endless stuttering of the hard drive and flickering cursor.

Oh well. $1,600 later, the new box should be here by week’s end, and I think I will just let this one get dirty.

(2012 MacBook Pro. Sigh.)

Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com