We two are bound.
I certainly wouldn’t be spending any time with her if we weren’t. She’s a clunky machine, clothed in unflattering plastic, smudged with all manner of untraceable material. Her casing is worn and cracked, but nowhere near as broken as what lies inside.
Her battery is quick to drain. Often, she refuses to load webpages for seemingly no reason. She crashes upwards of a dozen times a day, always at the most inconvenient times. If I didn’t know any better, I would say she was actively out to get me.
When I have notes to take or materials to study, she’ll refuse to load the document. Or, she’ll load the document, only for the page to become unresponsive within seconds and require a series of five to 10 reloads. Or, most likely, she’ll just crash.
She’s not consistent about it either. Some days she’ll work smoothly, and I’ll almost forget the depths of monstrous incompetence to which she can sink at any moment. Other days she’ll be less kind, subjecting me to hours upon hours of endless crashes followed by restarts.
I am not one to feel unbridled rage. There are lots of things which bring me close: dangerous people in positions of power, the taste of coconut, the way actors always seem to be drinking air from empty cups, so on and so forth. But those rages are all at least a little bridled; nothing truly makes me long for violent retribution like she does.
Oh, what I wouldn’t give to see even a morsel of the pain she has inflicted on me returned. Oh, how often I have wished to smash her to pieces with a hammer, or throw her to the ground from a third floor window, or douse her with gasoline and set her alight.
Don’t get me wrong—I think it’s wonderful that the district is able to afford to provide technology for so many people, especially those who might not have such access otherwise. But it’s a crying shame that this technology can so easily be reduced to an ineffectual, maddening lump of agony.
I’ve had a number of people tell me that the root of my frustration is that I overwork my Chromebook. Yes, it may be true that I’m in the habit of keeping over 100 tabs open at all times, but I would argue that such a thing should be well within the capabilities of a laptop intended to be used for a high school student’s schedule.
Since I take multiple AP classes on top of fairly demanding electives, keeping so many tabs open is the best way to organize all my work. I really don’t think that getting by in each of my classes should be too much to ask.
That said, maybe it is a little unfair to hold my Chromebook to blame. She was clearly not manufactured with the needs of a busy high schooler in mind. I, too, would likely crack under all that pressure. After all, we two are bound, whether or not either of us likes it.
Nevertheless, on the worst days, when it seems as though she is delighting in her own total failure as anything but a stubborn brick, allow me my occasional fantasies. To picture the image of her gutted and strewn in a million pieces is to find some reprieve in the hell of her operation.
Photo by Lili Gayton/The ECHO
