Plans for Ol' Greenie

Dietz Law (a.k.a. Murphy's Plus One) struck again last week in our house. In one week, we had to purchase a car for my hubby, a new fridge (for all of us), and a new laptop for me. Not the cheapest week we've had, that's for sure. Oh yes . . . and the router for our network died, too . . . probably overcome with grief over the laptop's demise.

According to Dietz Law, if something can go wrong, it will—there's the Murphy's portion of it—but only with more than one item at once, and at the optimum time when everything is dependent upon those items that suddenly fail (that's the Dietz portion of it).

Sometimes this works out for us, like the car: my husband's truck has been steadily failing, and just when it began to get serious about its death rattles, a neighbor put his car out for sale. Right price, right type (the "runs-when-you-turn-the-key-the-first-time" type), and right timing.

Sometimes the timing can be shuffled, like the refrigerator: it started to fail but miraculously came back to life, giving us a three-week reprieve before it started to fail again. Now we have a new fridge, cold food and a happy household.

But the laptop . . . ah, the laptop. If Howard Pyle were still alive, I'd have him write some overblown prose about its virtues.

My Toshiba Satellite is/was only three years old, which is probably ancient to the true computer geek but not all that ancient in my book. The worst part is, it worked just fine right up until the month prior to its collapse. Why, oh why? I had absolutely no problems with it for the past three years, and within four weeks it went from perfect to I-can't-boot-or-be-fixed-by-commoners.

Of course this happened right as I began a new editing job for an author with whom I've just begun to work. Now was not the time to start making excuses for why I couldn't complete the work for him in a timely manner. So, with plans to have the laptop fixed or gutted as soon as possible (because it's still shiny, and surely that should guarantee that it's fixable, right?), I headed off to Best Buy for the quickest purchase of my computer-buying life.

I walked in, found someone who looked smarter than I am (not too tough) and rattled off my requirements. I wanted it cheap, able to use the Internet, and I wanted MS Office. I truly didn't care what else it did. I narrowed down my choices and was out of the store within twenty minutes of arriving. The entire thing took me a total of an hour; the drive each way was longer than I was in the store, in fact.

That's how I ended up with Ol' Greenie. I am now the proud owner of a green ASUS notebook.

It certainly is green, isn't it? No mistaking that color for anything else. Think 1970s kitchen appliances.

The best part about it being so very, very green is that when I'm working, it lends a lovely green tinge to my skin. This causes people to steer clear of me because they think I'm ill, which is sort of a win-win situation because I can get my work done without interruptions.

One of my friends had a great idea: she suggested I take it with me to a cafe (like Panera or somewhere the hip people hang out with their notebooks), set up in a prominent place, and put a large, empty cup beside me at the table. The bilious look I acquire simply from having the notebook open in front of me will inspire passers-by to put donations of spare change in my cup to help me pay for the medical treatment I obviously can't afford. I'll have my investment dollars back in no time.

As always, I think her ideas are pure genius. I'm off to Panera.