Recently my laptop died.

Perhaps that’s a touch melodramatic. Maybe I should say that it failed or just that it stopped working and we couldn’t fix it. But it felt more personal than that. It had been slowing down for months. But then it was never the fastest. It had been bought for the Christmas and birthday of my last year of high school, I think mostly because my parents were getting irritated with me using their computers for, well, not as much homework as it should have been. Looking back it should have been less Farmville and more fractional distillation.

But it was a decent computer. For a while. Then I started to notice the problems. It overheated too fast, the casing was cracked, it had half the memory my friends’ computers had. But maybe my noticing these problems had more to do with me going off to university and being around a lot more laptops, laptops that hadn’t managed to suck up a burrow or two of dust bunnies, than my laptop actually slowing.

At least that was true for a long time. In my third and penultimate year of university my laptop started to get . . . cranky. It would slow down to painful speeds. Just opening up a word document would take long enough for me to go and wander around my room or pick up a book and read a few pages. It made me think of the terrible times before we changed to broadband and dial up was slow enough to boil a kettle in the wait.

Then one day a few weeks before the end of the semester it died completely. One minute I was writing an essay on E. E. Cummings, waxing lyrical on his punctuation and style, the next I had a blank screen and was staring into the reflection of my own shocked eyes. That was not a fun moment. What followed was a night of furious laptop hoovering, begging and tears.

About half a mile away, in a little house which looked more like a garden shed bolted onto the high street, there was a computer repairman. For some silver and gold (or in actual fact some paper) he opened up my laptop and dissected it, deciding that the problem was all those dust bunnies. A purge was completed and for a while my laptop bounced back. Its fans were unclogged and it was happy with life. I could go online without having to wait for pictures to finish loading! I was no longer under threat of burning the skin off my thighs when I sat with my laptop on my lap! I wrote, I played games, I went on Facebook gleefully and with abandon. Things were good.

This lasted until about a week into my summer. It had slowed again so I had taken advantage of my Dad’s promise to look at my laptop. This check-up discovered two things. One was that there were more viruses infesting my programs than a CDC inspector’s uncleaned shoes. The other was that when pressed on one particular corner everything would shut down. Now the fact that this corner was the one which I tended to pick up my laptop with explained it. But it also made it incredibly awkward as I had to learn, after five years, to pick up my laptop in an entirely new way. Apparently those cracks in the case were more important than I had thought.

Again my laptop seemed fine. I dutifully ran virus checkers and made sure that my data was easily accessible and backed up. It was in fact while I was backing up my data that everything, once more, fell apart. Half way through, just as the ultramarine bar was looking more full than empty, everything went black. And I swore a streak as blue. Dad was grabbed and the laptop was returned to its sick bed in his office.

After much button pushing, battery removal and returning it was decided surgery was needed. The dining table was cleared of the to-be-ironed pile and my laptop was placed face down. Screwdrivers were fetched. And each of the small screws holding its innards away from the world were attacked. At least until in a shocking moment one of the screwdrivers broke, driving its sharp end into the screw. Some time was spent trying to lever out the small piece of metal that had turned the screw into a deadbolt. This however proved impossible and misery of miseries we had to find another way of getting in. But it took another calamity for the surgery to be abandoned.

At some point in the design of the inner workings someone had decided that a hole right next to one of the main screws holding it all together would add the perfect amount of risk to proceedings. Of course this was not something we agreed with, and that screw disappeared deep into the mysterious workings of the laptop. Mysterious workings which had an unhealthy rattle to them already, an unhealthy rattle which promised nothing good.

The casing proved impassable, at least impassable as long as no drills or cutting instruments were used. Neither of which seemed like a wise choice with delicate machinery. And so my laptop was left for dad to tinker with for all eternity. It still occasionally has good days. Sometimes we can get a couple of hours out of it before it remembers it’s not supposed to be working and falls over.

My dad nodded, sighed and turned around to go back to his study. I followed, somewhat at a loss. It really was like a friend had died. But a friend you don’t so much have an emotional bond with, as much as you have a bond with the world it provides you with. It’s halfway between the loss of a carrier pigeon and the author of a cherished series of books. Suddenly you’re sitting on your hands and wondering how you’re going to get into that world.

Once in his study my dad sat down and started looking at laptops for sale. This felt a little fast to me but I nodded and looked at the ones he brought to my attention. All three of them. Once two of them were cast aside the third was bought. The entire process took less than ten minutes, including the time that I asked whether or not we should be checking the laptops against online reviews. But no, it was decided, not by me, that the reviews on the site would do just as well. The laptop with the most amount of reviews (eighty five, a very popular choice) was chosen over its nearest neighbour (only two, poor lonely thing). It was then bought and in a few days I would have a fully working laptop again! I nodded said thank you and then sort of stumbled away. Not quite sure how to deal with the speed I’d gotten a new laptop.

But what followed were an odd few days. I still had access to the internet, a phone in my pocket meant I wasn’t cut off from contact with friends. But I still felt cut off. Those games I mentioned playing? Well that was not happening. I felt antsy. The few games I had on my phone suddenly got more interesting than they had ever been before. I was racing through levels. I even finished one. Well finished until the next update. And my family was noticing. Jokes were made about how I was finally out my room. But it was all right, I had new opportunities now I was not sat in one spot watching a flickering screen all day. With all those free hours I had more time to be annoying. Popping up and getting in the way of things was my new favourite past time.

Then my new laptop arrived and all of a sudden I was plugged back into that world.

I’ve written this piece on it. It is still very shiny, I haven’t quite gotten up the nerve to take off all the protective plastic yet. It feels a bit like unwrapping a baby, I don’t want it to get cold or scratched.

But I learned a few things about myself when I was laptop-less. One thing is that I probably spend too much time on it. I could do with getting a few hobbies. Another is that without the chance to write whenever I want to my mind manages to be much more fertile, but much less productive. I can’t write as well on paper. I’m too used to going back and forth, backspacing and copy and pasting until the original thing I wrote is a hundred miles away in a corkscrew pattern from where I started. If I tried to write on paper for any length of time I’d soon be surrounded by a snowbank of screwed up sheets of paper. It seems I am most productive when I know editing is easy.

I have also learned this. I could live without it. But like with so many other elements of living today, phones, cars, fridges and plumbing, I wouldn’t want to.