Lap Topless

After my flurry of medical appointments (see previous post) my laptop decided it needed a heart transplant in the manner of a new battery. The old one, it seems, decided to stop taking a charge. I noticed this a week ago when the battery stayed at 97% for a few days. Thinking (not very hard, as it turned out) that it might just be refusing to “top up” I unplugged it until the battery was at 48% then plugged it back in, only to find it remained there over the next few days.

Having unintentionally cut my battery life in half, I could no longer countenance taking it to any cafés or pubs to work in, a practice I particularly enjoy. The only course of action open to me was to change the battery. Step one—according to DIY Google—was to open the laptop and get the model number from the resident battery.

If you have never attempted to open a laptop, allow me to give you some advice: don’t.

After an hour of prying and pulling and nearly taking my fingers off, I gave up and took the machine to a local IT guy. His advice concerning opening a laptop was: don’t.

It is so difficult, he told me, that they have a special tool to do it with, and even then, it still traps your fingers (he had the scars to prove it) and mere mortals can’t do it anyway, because there are hidden screws that only IT guys know the location of. So, I left it with him, and he promised to acquire the requisite battery and replace it in a few days.

Those few days were interminably long. You have no idea how addicted you are to something until you no longer have access to it. A few days later, when I enquired about progress, he gave me the unsettling news that the Royal Mail told him they had attempted delivery, but he wasn’t in. Never mind that he most definitely was in, and had CCTV proving that they had never attempted delivery, proof was no remedy to the fact that there was no battery to put into my still-on-life-support laptop.

And so, I am left to continue rising early, as is my habit, to go into my office and stare mournfully at the empty spot on my workstation where my laptop is supposed to be. And this is made worse by a stunningly foolhardy oversight on my part. Prior to taking the laptop to the IT guy, I cleverly copied all the relevant files to an external hard drive, figuring I could use my wife’s laptop in the interim. As it turned out, although I can access the files, my wife’s laptop has none of the requisite software needed to run them.

I write these posts in Scrivener, I make the pictures in Photoshop, I use editing software to cure my atricuous speling and clean syntx when if is needs.

This left me with the options of staring at the empty space on my workstation, or scanning a list of files on my wife’s laptop that I had no way of accessing. The feeling was one of numb disbelief, akin to the emotions I felt after backing my car onto a bollard back in December 2022.

But then I decided I was smarter than that. I could write a post in Notepad, draw the picutes myself, and email the results to my ISP to automatically update to my blog. It would be crude, but at least I could feel more in control than I did while waiting for a crane to come sort my car out.

So here it is, a blog post, done completely without modern software or fancy IT tools.

But don’t expect me to try this again. And spare a thought for my laptop; it’s still on the operating table, waiting for a heart transplant.