161: the Love of a Man for his Laptop

When is my laptop not my laptop?  When my fiancée has commandeered it to look at wedding venues, guest lists and house prices.  It’s like a paralysed limb; I can see it but no matter how much I twitch, wiggle and will I cannot get any functionality from it.  It is over there on the other side of the room happily being browsed as I am reduced to using my parent’s old desktop with the clunky keys and the weird square screen.  Everything is wrong.  This edition of Word doesn’t have the word count where my eyes keep looking for it, the browser is Firefox not Chrome and the desktop is a hideous mess of files without folders and redundant shortcuts.

When did my laptop become our laptop?  Has it inadvertently become her laptop in her confused mind?  Well it’s time I laid down the law, took a stand and claimed back my laptop… I’ll wait until she’s fallen asleep then sneakily retrieve it under cover of darkness.  Yes, that’s the plan.  In the meantime I’ll just have to get used to this bizarre old box that my parents call a computer.  It stands on the floor beside the desk and the speakers make an unholy humming from a loose connection.  

My dad is computer illiterate and needs to keep everything he ever might use sitting on the desktop where he can see it.  Nothing is ever deleted and useless install .exe files sit on the desktop assumed to be massively important.  Whatever you do don’t delete install_flash_player.exe; it’s a support file, and deleting it would cause the whole computer to collapse inward and break and crash.  And I don’t want to accidentally delete the internet.  And how do I record to Spotify and magnify SopCast and put FamilyTreeMaker on?  Tsch, parents eh!  What are they like?  Confused wrinkly luddites slipping into the habits of the elderly, that’s what. 

A couple of hours have passed and, glory be, I have my laptop back.  It was a happy reunion featuring ecstatic rousing music and a slow motion run towards one another across a sandy white beach.  We clasped each other tightly and swore never to be separated until the day we die, or at least until I get a better one.  We share a dirty little secret; shhh while I tell you about it.  I’ve just downloaded the first of the new Telltale episodic adventure game: Back to the Future.  That’s the first of five monthly episodes from the makers of three amazing series of Sam n Max games and one of Monkey Island.  And I’ll say it again; it’s Back to the Future.

So, lights out, earphones on and it’s time to get my geek on with some serious point n click adventure gaming, Telltale style. Oh yeah!