Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

So I’ve been sitting in front of my laptop for the last several days, its screen blank and its portability hampered by having to be tethered to a separate monitor, a monitor that does not fit in my off-to-work backpack.  Time now seems to be short, and if my laptop presents me with a living will, I’ll be duty-bound to unplug the monitor.

I went back to pricing a new Dell, as well as a new Macbook Pro.  The Dell will take about 10 days to get here from whenever I order it; the new Macbook is still hella expensive.  Then I remembered Craigslist, and its intoxicating capability to provide instant gratification, which alacrity seems prudent rather than rash in this case.  And there they were, several Macbooks in the price range of the new Dell.

I made an appointment with one of the sellers, and went to the bank to disgorge a chunk of currency to close the deal.  My wallet sort of looked at me in amazement, having never seen even one Benjamin (I don’t think), let alone a whole football team of them.

I arrived at the house to find an engaging young man who’d just moved here to take a job at Microsoft; they’d given him a laptop, surplusing his Macbook.  I posited that he probably couldn’t bring it on Campus anyway, but he assured me that there was plenty of Apple hardware socketed into the Borg.

He had “wiped” his Macbook when he moved (he said his previous employer had given it to him; I chose to believe him) and reinstalled the operating system, so there was no software to demo except for internet browsing.  But I was once again smitten with the Macbook, even this 2008 model.  I was about to release my Benjamins and scurry into the night with my prize when the kid volunteered to install a program so he could play part of a movie, just to demonstrate the speakers.

As the program installed, it asked his username and password.  And here came the glitch.  You know how we all have those one or two passwords that open the vault to almost everything we brush up against on the internet? He had decided NOT  to use one of those passwords when he “wiped” his Macbook.  And there was no way he was going to remember the one he used, struggle as he might.

We’ve all done this, whether it’s because a site’s “strong” password requirements precluded the use of our favorite, or because a pesky server requires a password change every quarter or so.  But I harbored a wee bit of schadenfreude upon seeing a 20-something with all his brain cells similarly come up blank.

So, I returned home empty-handed.  Except for those Benjamins.  I passed on the opportunity to return today, as the kid had found some cd’s and reinstalled the OS.  I’m still looking, but I think I want to have a little clearer idea of who actually owns the machine.