The first time I was issued a laptop by an employer, I was
an English teacher at a charter school in Marlborough, Massachusetts. It was a STEM school (Science,
Technology, Electricity and Magic).
But as someone who was not terribly fluent with the technology part, I
feared my new appliance.
I was
raised to have a healthy respect for technology. When I got my learner’s permit, my parents told me, “It’s
not that you should feel PANICKED about aiming two-and-a-half-metric-tons of
lethal steel toward roadways containing children. You just need to respect your power.”
Oh, I
respected my laptop and its powers. In
fact, I never broke eye contact with it from the moment I depressed its ON
button until it powered down. And
I remained in this heightened state of vigilance throughout all eight hours of
my workday.
It was
in this altered state that I trained on an expensive grading program our
school had purchased. With my sweaty fingertips poised over the keyboard’s vicinity (the trembling caused
my hands to wander, mostly toward my car keys) I somehow caused the program to under-shoot
my students’ grade-point-averages.
The
software started reprogramming, regurgitating, re-calibrating and re-calculating
until, appearing next to 74 student-names, were digits so exponentially
negative, SO infinitely “to the left” of a number-line, they created a black
hole – a spinning vortex -- from which light and hopefully, my laptop, could
never escape.
Admin
had to hire I.T. staff to come reconfigure my hard-drive.
It is no
wonder that, from this day forward, I cultivated a healthy animosity toward my
laptop.
Once my
school showed me the bill for my laptop’s repair, my animosity turned to a hatred
so unspeakable, my conscious mind had no capacity to acknowledge
it.
What
else could explain my out-of-body experience when I – without my actual
awareness –placed my black-matte-finish laptop onto my vehicle’s black-matte-finish
convertible top – and drove off?
The
beeping a mile up the road at a red light was disconcerting. I wondered if there were some medical
emergency or biohazard I had inadvertently stopped my car on.
Oh, there
was.
The
kindly gentleman behind all that beeping finally ran up to my driver-side
window and shouted, “You left your LAPTOP on the roof of your CAR,” and several biohazards took place right there in my driver’s seat.
This guy
had followed me from the moment I exited the school’s parking lot until I went
around a tight turn, where my laptop – like a tragic hero on his deathbed – quietly ‘slipped away.’
When I
returned to school the next day, I was so jealous of my other colleagues.
Not the ones whose laptops rested safely
in their actual laps.
The other
colleagues. The ones who were lucky enough to have their laptops stolen.
Our
charter school in its start-up year was forced to trim costs, so they did not
purchase much insurance for things like… teachers or their laptops.
Anyone
who lost their laptop simply never got
another one. It was much the way
many of us were raised as children. You lost the ice cream off the top of your
cone and that was that. No feel-good-replacement
scoops for us. It was the Firm
Hand approach.
Our school’s
hand was so firm, it made teachers who lost their laptops – through larceny at gunpoint or in my case, an Act of God – have to log onto giant, coal-fired communal desktops down in the teachers’
lounge. The kind that, even IF you
had a forklift to lower one onto the top of your car, you’d never drive off
with it up there, due to the telltale crushed car underneath.
Just
when I was getting comfortable with the idea of logging in and out of my own
computerized colossus (I fantasized about sitting by a steam-punk tower taller than the one that leans in Pisa today) my principal sashayed into my
classroom, bearing my black-matte laptop.
“Oh
shit,” mouthed my lips.
“Sorry,
Carolyn, what was that?”
“That’s
IT,” I gushed. “Where did you FIND it?”
“Someone
from the industrial complex next-door saw it on the side of the road. They brought it right over today.”
“How on
EARTH did they know it belonged to someone at our school?”
“The
bumper sticker you defiled it with, Carolyn. The one with your sons' band's name. Bang Camaro. Everyone knows
you’re its mother.”
This would
not be the first time that little 24-man band would act as a bellwether foretelling
my downfall. Meanwhile,
down that laptop did fall, evidenced by the wiggly hinge on one side.
“Robert,
does it even WORK?”
“Oh, we
had I.T. check it out. It’s
working great. We were even hoping
you’d send an email to the DELL Corporation, about how rugged their product
is! We’re thinking they might
offer us a discounted insurance plan.
Just for you.”
“Aw, you
guys think of EVERYTHING.”
“Just be
careful with that hinge. See how
it’s wobbly and bent? You want to
be extra careful not to bang or – God forbid – DROP it, because if that hinge
snaps in two, the razor-sharp edges will sever the wires right behind it, and
that disconnects it permanently from the motherboard.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning
you’ll have a matte-finish black paperweight.”
“No kidding... ”
“By the
way, we have a fire drill in three minutes. And, congratulations!
I’m sure you missed your technology.” He handed over my laptop and, like that. He was gone.
So many
thoughts raced through my mind, I could hardly track of any of them.
But I
was a professionally-licensed educator and with a fire drill on tap, there was
no time for racing thoughts. Robert had said seconds earlier that in three minutes--WHOOOP
WHOOOP! WEEEE-ew WEEEE-ew! OOO….WAAAAA-rat-a-tat-tat; OOO…WAAAAA-rat-a-tat-tat; Ahhhh-OOOOOOOOOOOOO-Ga!
Two
minutes and forty seconds early.
I was
NOT prepared.
I was
still cradling Lucinda, My Recovered Laptop when – oh no.
It all
happened so fast.
Make
that slow. Like a car crash when
everything moves in slow-motion.
My arms
lurched from the screech of that Fire Alarm, amplified through surround-sound speakers located six inches from where I stood – and there in mid-air, spinning like a Ninja, was Lucinda – off to
Infinity and Beyond – twisting and spiraling ever onward, torquing
like a broken dancer then –
WHOM
She
crash-landed.
Right on
that broken hinge.
It took
such a direct hit, Lucinda seemed to spring back upright from that triangular
point-of-impact, as though the hinge were a pogo stick.
She spun
‘round four more times before landing, once again, on that broken hinge. Finally, she collapsed, exhausted, into a pile of her own hinge-dust.
That
hinge snapped directly in two, just as Robert predicted.
After
the fire drill was over, I visited I.T., pointing to Lucinda’s now two-piece
hinge.
“It just sort
of … DID this.”
I helpfully
pointed out that, probably, the hinge was ‘ready to go.’
And,
poof. Like that!
Lucinda
got duct-taped so those razor-sharp edges came NO WHERE NEAR the motherboard
wire.
That is
because she was duct-taped directly to the Top of my Teacher Desk up in Room
301 where she remained, immobilized, for fifteen more months, until I looped up
with my students and moved to a different building.
The
moral of the story is… be careful what you wish for.
None of
this would have happened if I had not broken a sacred teacher-commandment and
coveted my neighbors’ communal – and permanently mounted to the teachers’
lounge – computers. The kind
bolted down by their own heft to metallic desk units.
My
school’s thoughtful I.T. department fashioned for me my very own.
Oh, by
the way, I did write to DELL. It turned
out that, no matter how many emotional epistles I sent to them, lauding their use
of alien technology with a patented hybrid of rubberized-titanium and kryptonite,
they never offered my school an insurance discount.
I had to
get that at an entirely different
STEM school a few years later, after the first one could no longer afford the
expansion-pack of I.T. staff for my appliance misadventures.
My next
school was pretty solutions-oriented.
Their "insurance plan" was a student intern named Stefanie. She
completed her I.T. Practicum on me and my various issues until she graduated, with honors.
Ahhh, that school put the M back in Science, Technology,
Electricity and Magic. I mean LOOK at me, using magic to blog!
Thank You, Charter STEM Schools Everywhere! Emoticon Hearts to You ALL! <3 <3
<3 <3 <3 <3
<3 <3 <3 <3
