I have a box – no, two boxes – of cords and connections belonging to various computing devices.
The devices themselves are long gone.
How does this happen?
Last year I bought a cheap ($40) Kobo Literati e-reader at Bed Bath & Beyond. I liked it, but it was slow and balky. Barnes & Noble had an online sale for reconditioned Nooks, so I bought one ($80), and loved it, until it started acting wonky. Then, a few months ago, my office granted me an iPad, and the Nook joined the Literati on the unused-gadget shelf.
Goodbye and good luck, my one hundred and twenty dollars.
I’ve always been very conscientious about backing up my computer. Some years ago I heard of this great new backup system: the Jazz drive. I bought one on eBay, for maybe $40, and a bunch of Jazz disks (which are like cassettes on steroids) for maybe $25. I used it probably four times. It was clunky and noisy and difficult to set up. I now own a smooth little candy-bar sized storage device that plugs into my laptop with a USB connection, and which slurps up all my data effortlessly.
Another sixty-five bucks down the tube.
I could go on forever. I am too cheap to buy a proper iPod, so I have purchased at least three cheap imitations, none of which works right, total cost (estimated) sixty bucks. Then there was the reconditioned laptop, which was wonderful and lasted for about a year, until it actually had a nervous breakdown, complete with beeping and booping sound effects. Two hundred dollars down the drain. (Moral, if you haven’t been keeping track: don’t buy reconditioned items.) The next laptop lasted quite a while – four years, maybe – but it became painfully slow and difficult to use during its last year of active service. It was around four hundred bucks, I think.
(My current Dell Inspiron laptop also cost around four hundred bucks; I think I bought it in early 2009, and it is going strong almost three years later. It has some quirks – it often refuses to recharge its battery – but it is light and easy to use, and I am partial to it. I had a whirlwind love affair with the iPad when I first got it a few months ago, but – as someone online wisely stated not long ago – the iPad is not a laptop. Laptops are far more powerful and speedier, and much easier to use for word processing (it is not pleasant to type on a smooth glass surface). I just bought one of those fancy iPad cases with a built-in Bluetooth keyboard, which makes it a bit nicer to use, but iPads are mostly for travel, I think: it was a godsend on our last two trips, to Orlando and to Cape Cod. At home, my laptop is (as Eloise said of Nanny) my mostly companion.
But I still visualize all that money flown out the window, for all those lovely glittering gadgets I bought, thinking they would change my life.
A few of them did.
But I should have chosen more carefully.
Let’s face it. I’m an idiot.
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