For 5 Hours, I Was A Cool Kid

The computer started having convulsions on Thanksgiving evening. Mind you, it had been having minor setbacks for quite some time that we've tried ignoring. Things such as taking ten full minutes to decide it wants to turn on when I push the start button, or freezing up for no reason whatsoever. The fact that our anti-virus software (that we paid a fortune for) is turned off when the computer finally comes on was undetected for a few days, and we're pretty sure that something bad and scary happened to the internal workings of the computer while that was disabled. The fact that it's randomly turned off for no reason whatsoever tells  me that the anti-virus program is not all that effective at this point anyway. And then last Thursday, the hard drive started making a not-so-fun noise as the computer decided if it wanted to fire itself up or not. The noise rather sounded like a generator was running inside the laptop. That's never good, you know?

After I spent an hour backing up everything on the computer onto our external hard drive, and uploading all my photos to Flickr for safe keeping, and putting the same photos in my Dropbox as a third backup plan (photos are that  important to me), and then after cursing a few times inside my head, I realized that if I'm going to have to buy a computer, Black Friday was the day to do it.

And then, after staying up until nearly 2AM, we weren't able to get the great and awesome computer deals online that we wanted, because everyone and their third cousin had the same idea. So I went to bed, quite disgruntled. And in the morning, Sam had the bright idea to buy a Mac, because we are just so tired of fighting viruses, and paying good money for all the latest and greatest virus protection packages that fail us repeatedly. (Seriously, I'm clueless where we viruses from. I must have an INFECT ME sign on my virtual forehead or something.) I had to concur that the man was right, and Apple offered $100 off a new MacBook on Black Friday, so I invested my money wisely, and paid for 2 day shipping so that I was sure to get my new computer before the old one decided it just didn't want to wake up one morning.

Today, my new computer arrived. Since I was working, I set the box aside and vowed to play when work was done. But then I had parent teacher conferences, and had to schlep kids, and had a meeting in town, and needed a few groceries while there. So I came home to a message from my workplace that said, "Oh. You bought a Mac? The audio files we use aren't compatible with a Mac, you need a PC."

So today was the day that I owned a Mac for all of 5 hours before I had to call Apple and ask about their return policy. I had a few moments of cussing inside my head again, too. Darn these computers anyway. Since it's after office hours, I'm waiting to hear back from the workplace to see if the whole "run your Mac like a PC" program is going to work or not.

And in the meantime, I'm telling myself that a Toshiba is going to be a whole lot easier on the wallet.