I have a laptop that has traveled with me for the last 14 months. It is a Gateway T-series (W350A), and it was (to me) perfect in every way. It was the right size. It had a nice screen. It had plenty of processing power and plenty of RAM to run Vista. It had good battery life. It had the right number of USB ports in the right places. It had HDMI out so you could plug it into an HDTV. Also: a handy camera, a high-speed memory card slot, good keyboard, capacious hard disk, etc. Extremely nice sleep and hibernate features, which are important if you travel a lot.

It had been tuned, mainly by removing extraneous crap, so that Vista would boot quickly and it would never crash. It had all the applications I needed, loaded and customized.

And we had been through so much together. This laptop had survived 30 or so factory visits as well as trade shows, conferences, trips, etc. It had been through more than a hundred airports, dozens of rental cars and hotels. It ALWAYS worked. I had managed to keep it from getting stolen, lost, dropped, stepped on, crushed by forklifts, etc.

Why do I feel this attached to a piece of equipment? I mean, it’s just plastic and metal. But it “fit” so well. And the guy who said “familiarity breeds contempt” was completely wrong. In this case, familiarity bred efficiency. Everything worked perfectly, so every task became easy and efficient.

And then yesterday it was killed. In an instant, without any warning, it died in a most tragic way. I had it set up on my desk, plugged into the network for a couple of days. But I had left the office to talk to David on the front porch for a minute.

From outside, David and I heard the crash. From another part of the house Leigh heard the crash as well. We converged on the office and then saw the laptop, splayed on the floor upside down. Because of the attached network cable, the router had been yanked three feet out of position as well. And the power supply for the laptop was in the hallway.

Apparently the dog had gone into the office, walked up to the window to see outside (probably because she could hear David and I talking on the porch), got tangled up in the power cord and bolted, dragging the laptop with it.

When I picked up the laptop and turned it over, the screen was shattered.

The emotions here are interesting. Yes, I am mad at the dog. Yes, I am pissed that we will have to waste how ever many dollars to replace the machine. But there is also this weird kind of grief, because it was such a perfect machine (to me). It will take days to find a replacement machine, configure it, reload all the applications, tune it. The new machine definitely won’t be as good a “deal”, since the now-dead laptop was bought at a Best Buy “Black Friday” supersale and really was a steal. And who knows if the new machine will be that stable and reliable? This machine would probably have lasted two or three more years before becoming obsolete.

I guess it is like crashing a car that you really love. Or worse yet, having some drunk driver crash into a car you really love through no fault of your own. Yes, you go buy another car and you get over it. But it is still a sad day.

[PS - I hadn't really thought about it until now, but this will also double the cost of the dog. To understand what I mean by that, see How much does a dog really cost?]