On Technology

Last week, my laptop stopped working; well, it just won't charge anymore. At first, it still worked if I pushed the cord in far enough and wiggled it around a bit, but then it completely stopped working. Resigned, I decided to go to BestBuy and see what could be done to fix it.

Now I've only had my laptop for a year. Officially I got one, so I could use it for conferences. In reality, I wanted a laptop, so I could sit on my couch and watch TV while getting some work done or maybe talking to friends online. In the past year, my laptop has become more and more important in my daily routine. Initially, I would bring it out on weekends; then I started using it occasionally during the week. Soon I would turn on my laptop the second I left the office in the evening and spend the rest of the day checking e-mail, chatting online, surfing the internet and playing sudoku.

I was obviously aware that I used my laptop a lot, but I didn't realize how "addicted" I was until I didn't have it anymore. This past week hasn't been easy. It started last weekend: I had to do evaluations for the graduate students we interviewed. The evaluations were due Monday at 8 am. Faced with the choice to either sit in my office for hours and write evals or sit on my couch, watching TV while doing it, I picked the second option. But without a laptop that meant writing all the evaluations by hand. Now I'm not anti-writing by hand, but when I write fast, I don't have the nicest handwriting. Would everyone be able to read it? Probably not. So I spent some painful hours trying to write very nicely. And because I had procrastinated all weekend, I found myself staying up almost all of Sunday night in a desperate attempt to get all the evals done by the deadline.
The rest of the week wasn't any easier. When I left work at night, I couldn't do much without my laptop - I really had to leave work. "Good for you," you may say. "Stop being such a workaholic!" Well, yes, maybe that was a good thing. But I also didn't get much done this week. Toward the end of the week I realized that I'd fallen behind in several aspects of my job and decided to spend some extra hours in the office. I also haven't e-mailed any of my friends in a while and I just now (at 1:30 am on a Saturday night/Sunday morning) updating this blog.

How did I survive without a laptop before???