Turning Over a New Leaf...Sort Of

by Lauren Roux

My new laptop. Its scarred black rubbery case and small heavy frame made a mockery out of the term portable. The keyboard buttons would fly off while I was typing and I’d have to spend hours hunched over it with tweezers and a cramped finger trying to fit the small plastic letters back on. There were so many little problems that made it almost impossible to use, but, alas, it was all mine.

I had purchased the laptop from a coworker for five hundred dollars, and it even managed to load properly most of the time. I could sit in my room, away from all the noise, and type for hours. I had started to write a couple of books while at work and at home, and was saving them directly to the hard drive so that I could pull them up in my free time. Since I was working for my father at the time, I had it plugged into the wall pretty much nonstop.

Then one day at work, while I was typing away on my laptop—waiting for the next student to walk through the door, to ring up a bill, or even for the phone to ring—one of my father’s employees came rushing into the room carrying a large stack of books. I jumped up to get the door for him, momentarily forgetting that my laptop was plugged into the wall. As I moved toward the door, I tripped over the shin-high cord and watched the poor old laptop jerk off the table, flip through the air, and crash down on its screen. All I could do was stare down in horror at what I had done.

Crouching down, I carefully picked up my laptop and put it back on the table. I turned it on and anxiously wrung my hands as I waited silently to see whether it could still boot up. To my surprise, it did. But each time I turned it on after that, it would take just a little bit longer to load. Then the problem bar started popping up and I’d have to restart the computer, until finally it wouldn’t even load the problem bar. That laptop teased me for a week, and before I even thought to save my writing to a memory stick, I couldn’t access it anymore.

The employee who had sold it to me told me he could fix the problem. My laptop ended up sitting on his desk for six months while he tried to find the best deal for the "broken" piece. Finally, I took the computer back from him and went to a computer shop to see if they could fix it. The "piece" that he told me would be about sixty-eight dollars turned out to be a cracked motherboard and would end up costing me almost the same amount as buying a brand new laptop. Needless to say, it sat at home for a while.

I lost the memory stick with all my other writing on it (I thankfully later found it hiding under my bed). Running out of options, I ended up hitting the pause button on that part of my life. Through perseverance I managed to get a not-so-wonderful job working retail in a small mom-and-pop store just before Christmas, and I didn’t have enough energy to begin writing again until they cut back my hours. After that, I started writing parts of my stories on loose-leaf notebook paper. I also kept, and still do, a journal for future plot lines, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.

I finally made the decision to get another job, a decision that was pushed to the forefront as the owners played favorites with their employees and engaged in mega-battles of wills in front of and with us. As my slowly dwindling hours of retail turned into a less-than-satisfactory ten-hour workweek, I applied for and acquired a technician position at a large corporation, and I began making enough money so that I could focus on my laptop again.

Packing up all its equipment, I lugged it around to local computer stores to find out how much it would cost to retrieve data. Nearly all of them told me it would cost about fifty dollars to remove two files from memory, though I was told by one employee that would be a total rip-off. I wasn’t in that much of a hurry to retrieve the files … until the writing contests hit.

Oh, how I love and hate them—the chance to get your work out there, to be seen and read, to get the chance to move forward with your career and at the same time to compete with hundreds of other potentials who are also sending in their hopefuls. These contests force you to spend weeks anxiously looking through the mail or running for the phone every time it rings because you never know exactly how you will be contacted if you win. As the weeks go by and you still haven’t heard from them, you come to the realization that they have picked another winner—if they have even picked one at all.

So there I was, looking at submission guidelines and thinking, if only I had the writing from my laptop—I could look over it, make a couple of changes and submit it to this wonderful writing contest. I was headed out the door to Comp USA—my plan was to fork over the fifty dollars it would take to get two documents off my computer—when my mother suggested I take it to a friend of the family. He has had that darn thing for weeks now. I realized two weeks into this final endeavor that through some miscommunication on my part, he didn’t even know why the laptop was there in the first place. Through several emails and personal conversations, he now understands what’s going on. Unfortunately, it has been a couple of weeks since I have heard from him. As soon as I can, I’m going over to his house, taking back my laptop, and hightailing it down the street to the local computer store where I will just pay the fifty dollars so that I can get moving on my writing. But the question is, What have I learned from this long, drawn out two-year experience?

One, never save your work to a hard drive that might break or have technical difficulties without first saving it to another removable device. Two, memory sticks are great, if you don’t lose them. Three, don’t rely on people to fix your computer if they can’t do it within a week. Four, make sure to properly explain why a person might have your computer in the first place. And five, if you have the chance to retrieve the data, do it at the first possible moment. You might regret paying more than you need to, but in the end it’s not as bad as the disappointment you feel when you can’t submit your writing on time.

Lauren Roux was born in King County. She works at Weyerhaeuser and her hobbies include writing and fencing. E-mail her.