Old Times

It was like old times. I came to office in the morning and opened my mails – personal and official. There were many mails to read and reply. Nothing unusual about it, much less to something to blog. Wait, there is a reason. This has happened to me after 2 years. Yeah, for the last 12 hours I had no computer access. Only few days back, I was so smug about my laptop and I thought IBM laptops (now Lenovo) are the best ones around. But yesterday morning the inevitable happened.

The screen flickered and computer hanged. Mouse pointer won’t shift and keys won’t work. I thought rebooting will make it fine and so I booted it. It started working, I was happy but it was shortlived. After something like 10 minutes back to square one. I knew the worse has happened. Why did I have to be happy over my laptop? May be my thought process is jinxed. I connected to IBM site and the site offered to identify my computer. In few seconds the details were infront of me. The serial number, type number, domestic warranty, International warranty and support center in Finland. Atleast things were moving. I called the support center and they opened a ticket and gave me some esoteric number. After one hour someone from UK called me and spurted out like a taped message. In short it was that they suspect some problem with the display adapters and so mother board has to be changed. Mother board? How come? I mean what else is there in a computer other than mother board and processor. There is a reason to call it a ‘mother’ board and my laptop is not even 2 years old. The guy did what they do best. “Sir, I am just a technical support executive, our engineers would be better able to tell you why it happened”, this was his reply.

They want my laptop to be shipped to their support center in Helsinki and it will be returned to me after 7 days! I am not sure, but I think it takes less than 7 hours to assemble a laptop. The executive offered me a workaround i.e. to use an external monitor. This is how I am using my laptop while writing this blog. I borrowed one external monitor in office and it is working fine. But at home I have no external monitor so no computer and no internet. Sigh. I am not going to ship my laptop for 7 days until I get a replacement laptop. Let’s see what happens.

But I still love my laptop and my next laptop will again be IBM. After all it is Hollerith’s company. Won’t someone like to buy a bulb directly from the company of Edison (GE) Computers are known to be unreliable and I will request Oxford dictionary to include it as an adjective. For example - he/she is so computer (unreliable)