Junior to the Rescue

I have a great big beautiful Dell XPS M170 that I love like she brings me breakfast in bed. Every morning. With fresh-squeezed orange juice. When I bought her about two and a half years ago, she was literally top of the line in laptops at Dell. She was everything you could possibly want in a laptop. Far more power than I needed, strictly speaking, to play on-line poker which was my passion at the time. But Stace had said if you’re going to get a laptop get everything you want so you don’t have any regrets later. I bet there are a lot of men out there envying me Stace right about now. Little do you know. She’s even better than you think.

Anyway, I ordered just exactly what I wanted. She looked like a ’70s muscle car. She was huge. She was powerful. She was chrome. She was brushed steel. She was apparently made of the same material they use to make Faberge eggs. As it turns out the best thing I tacked on to the base model was the four year bumper-to-bumper extended warranty.

In two and a half years I’ve gone through:

• Three graphics cards
• Two mother boards
• Two monitors
• Two memory cards
• Four power cords

I will say that while I have been completely unimpressed with the quality of the workmanship of my Dell, their service has been astonishingly good. We live in the middle of nowhere, so they have to send a Tech up to the house from way down in Arkansas. His name is Jeremy. He is the greatest guy ever. If I knew his home address, I would send him cookies. Or a pie. Or maybe cookies and a pie. Or a new iPhone. Or something. I adore Jeremy. He has made special trips to our house to get the baby back up and running only minutes before we were set to leave for the month.

That’s the problem with a computer that breaks down all the time when you’re on the road. We are out four weeks and then home about four or five days. If the computer breaks down three days after we leave home, I’m just screwed for the next three and a half weeks. If Jeremy didn’t make that extra effort to get me up and running while we’re home, I would be without the computer for another month before we could get home and try again to get it fixed.

I spent weeks and weeks and weeks without a computer during the first year I owned her. It was maddening. Then one day she broke down again right after we had left home and I just snapped. I drove straight to a Wal-Mart in the big-truck. Parked. And marched straight back to the computer section. I looked over all the models. They had a little Dell Inspiron sitting there ready to go. Obviously, I was hesitant to buy another Dell, but in the end I figured that at least I knew Dell would make it right if anything went wrong with it. I took the box up to the checkout and emphatically said “yes” when they asked me if I wanted to purchase the extended warranty.

Thirty minutes start to finish and I was headed back to the truck with “Junior.” I have to say Stace wasn’t quite as supportive of my purchase this time around. I believe she used the word ‘crazy’ several times. And not in that good honey-you-so-crazy way a woman will say it when you suggest skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool. More in the this-is-one-of-the-craziest-things-you’ve-ever-done-you-have-a-$4,000-computer-sitting-right-there-have-you-lost-your-mind sense of the word. But she didn’t have me committed. Which you know she could do any time she wanted. She has the power of attorney on her at all times. Thankfully the Wal-Mart parking lot I had squeezed us into was going to be hell to get the truck out of so she still needed me for a while. Whew!

There I was with the Baby — minus any sort of display at all — sitting in her big old backpack case, and Junior fresh out of the box sitting on the steering wheel. Oh happy day. I wasn’t going to be entertainment deprived and reduced to sitting in a dark truck staring out the windshield all month like so many truckers do. Granted, Junior wasn’t going to have excellent broadband internet access like the Baby has, but still its far better than watching trucks drive through the truck stop.

Then Jeremy fixed the baby when we got home that month. And she never broke down again. Not once. So Junior has basically just been riding around in the truck taking up precious space for months. Until today. The Baby’s voracious appetite has eaten through yet another power cord and it is finally Junior’s chance to shine. To come to the rescue. To prove I’m not crazy. Go, Junior, go.