Without Laptop

My HP device was tried and true for its five or so years, meaning about $120 per year or $10 per month.  It failed twice, requiring some costly though cost-effective repair.  Once some settings went awry, the other time the hard drive reached the end of its life span.  It's terminal event was more ignominious, drowning in herb tea from a cup that got knocked over from an overfilled and off balanced desktop stand. Those Geeks at Best Buy were able to save its data but not its innards.

It had what I needed.  Ample ports, comfortable keyboard with visible letters whose keys responded to my multi-fingered touch.  I had personalized it with a sticker of an SLU Billiken.  If lost, as I would transport it to OLLI and often far destinations, it had a sticker with my name and address, though neither my phone number nor email contact which would have been more useful to an honest finder of lost objects.  It served me well until its abrupt end, surfing me through the world, enabling a few Power Point presentations, providing me a forum to articulate what I thought through social media responses, my blogs, or submissions for publications.

Among my many good fortunes has been a reasonable accumulation of wealth which enabled me to seek a replacement as soon as the Geek informed me of my pseudo-animate friend's demise.  While still at Best Buy I looked at replacements. I don't particularly like shopping there, though they have the best computer service.  Their selection of laptops, and even the option of an All-in-One, was placed by professional marketers who know how to make the expensive alluring but keeping the lower priced options either more obscure in the display or more typically placed adjacent to a gleaming model so the comparison becomes more obvious, even it the disparity in value isn't.  Staples did better.  It's where I had purchased my now departed device.  They had a very small display, which is good.  There are studies showing that people who choose from among a handful of options tend to prove more content with their selection than those who choose among dozens.  Too many thoughts of what could have been.  But I knew all that I saw fell short of what I had just lost, and the Staples Geeks did not distinguish themselves when I needed them.  Since Target had to be passed to get home, I stopped there too.  Mostly lower end Chomebooks, though I had to look up what a Chromebook was when I got home.  It's low price and portability would probably make it a useful second device for travel if I opted for an All-in-One desktop replacement.  Once home, my smart phone connected me to online Amazon and Staples, each reliable, though with an overwhelming array of choices.  By days end, I used the filtering devices to get something very similar to what I had both in features and in price.  Staples had a lower price but less desirable supplemental warranty, so I went with Amazon, paying the extra $50 for the item and securing a four year warranty that covers all unintentional mishaps. In my two decades of dependence on these electronics, this is my second unsalvageable liquid spill, the first being my first decent smart phone.  Worth the peace of mind.

These days without a real keyboard exposed me to a previously unrealized reality of our Covid isolation.  In the past, when I needed a keyboard with screen, our local library served as a good safety net.  I almost never had to wait for an available computer, though they limited each session to one hour and a total of three hours in any single day. While it was too public a place to log my finances on Excel, with a flash drive I could type away whatever I wanted to write on Word, keep my work in my possession, and transfer it to my home computer or pre-retirement to my at work desktop for further revision.  Alas, our library is closed.  My wife has a laptop which she offered to me but only used one time. It lacked a numeric keypad and the keys when pressed offered an insecure, maybe overused feel.  I could not type on it effortlessly as I could with mine, the library's, or my work desktop.  As a result, I only did a few time dependent essentials like renewing a medical license, but avoided creative expressions.  In the meantime I also obtained via online shopping a low end 10 inch tablet which replaced another tablet of similar generic vintage.  This one feels more substantial than its predecessor though less responsive.  I understand why it is of essentially disposable price.  Adequate for reading from the internet, maybe even pretty good for reading an e-book.  Not at all suitable for typing in anything more profound than a password.

So I found myself with the more verbal segments of my mind stymied a few days.  Fast and short tweets or FB responses dominated. My more weighty thoughts require longer words, more complex sentence structure, the ability to navigate between sources, a thesaurus to help me select a more precise word than my mind generated, and to copy and paste what I find via exploration.  All this had to be set aside, not really a form of vacation to be pursued with renewed vigor, but more like an illness that would require convalescence once Amazon delivered the replacement laptop and the salvaged contents of its predecessor restored.  In the midst of feeling deprived, though, an opportunity arose.  Without the keyboard, I resorted to taking notes on paper, jotting down fragments of my thoughts that could create more coherent compositions and sequence of thought than I have been able to do with keyboard alone.  It's how I was taught to think and transfer thoughts to paper.  Correction of composition was much harder with typewriter so having that outline has lost its importance, but these days with a note pad may have restored an important but overlooked skill.

I'm back.  New laptop up and going, though without a DVD drive which I use, but HP deemed obsolete.  My notes on what I want to write about some uneasy Jewish organizational relations appeared in my line of vision as I resumed my first Word initiative on my new device.  The days away were not a vacation from expressing what I think but forced some useful return to previous processes that I realize now had become underutilized.