The Third Laptop
Lately I’ve been using three laptops. One for my full-time job, one for my freelance gigs, and one for my personal (and, I’d like to think, more creative) pursuits. The most powerful of the three is the newest, although I could tell right away when the IT guy handed it to me -- when I first visited my new place of employment -- that it wasn’t brand new. The second one might be significantly older than the first, but it still has enough juice to play old games with, and index books with, and listen to streaming music with -- I just have to leave it plugged in, because the battery has seen better days. The third one is the oldest, running on an ancient Pentium processor, but still better than the PC assigned to me many years ago when I used to work for a publishing company in the Philippines -- but that’s another (hilarious) story. When I fire up the first laptop, which I do every morning from Monday to Friday (but now, more increasingly, also during weekends), I feel a sense of dread. I...