After so many years of faithful service, my laptop screen just flickered and died. After putting it to sleep and waking it up again, the screen was working intermittently, and it might be that I could force some more service from it; but with this added to the machine’s already-substantial list of eccentricities, it appears that it has finally reached the end of its service. Fortunately, the friends I am staying with have a desktop they never use in the guest room where I’m already sleeping; and once Lenovo gets over its bizarre troubles with processing my order, my new laptop will be headed for the Thurkettle homestead. It held out for as long as it needed to.
The typical response to your modern computer problem is on the spectrum between simple annoyance and pure berzerker rage, but I feel nothing like that. I’ve known this day was coming for a long time, and feel a strange fondness as I think on everything that laptop and I have shared. It knows as many of my secrets as my most intimate friends.