The Passing of a Friend

A sad event has occurred which has resulted in the passing of a good friend, my Dell Inspiron laptop. Sigh... After three years of wonderful companionship, my good friend has finally seen his day. At first, I thought it wouldn't be difficult to fix a broken monitor hinge, so I took out the screws and opened the case up, disconnected the display cable and the LCD lighting cables, removed the broken hinges, marred up the metal with a screwdriver, and gorilla glued the crud out of it.

Apparently Gorilla Glue isn't as strong as it's proponents tout because the hinge support broke right off again. After a few tries, I decided to weld it back together, which did work but the when the metal settled, it had slipped under the clamp and hardened crooked <@!%#>, so my laptop is now essentially a desktop and I found myself in the market for a new one. At least this is a good time of year to be buying something like this, right?

Black Friday is so much of what I'm all about: unrealistically awesome prices, early hours, enduring freezing cold temperatures, and pulsating crowds of people foaming at the mouth over the piles of steeply discounted merchandise. Ah yes, and this year I didn't intend to merely peruse through countless shelves, but I had a real need and I was shooting to kill. I got off work at midnight and promptly joined my friends Nate and Thomas who had reserved a patch of sidewalk out front of Best Buy with what had become a quivering sea of shivering people and tents which stretched to the end of the block and out of sight.

To make the stay a bit more bearable, we got some extension cords and a power converter at WalMart, and some burritos at Betos (a bad choice), and hunkered down between some dude with a kerosene lantern and two guys reading Treasure Island in a tent . We ran the extension cords from Nate's car to the sidewalk where we huddled under sleeping bags and blankets (thanks to Nate for letting me use one of his sleeping bags because I didn't have one in Provo) and watched Star Trek on a laptop.

One of my friends, who happened to be at the front of line, snagged a voucher for the Sony VAIO I was looking for and brought it to me. Andrew, I owe you big time for that. After an hour and a half in line, I finally snagged my new Sony VAIO laptop. While in line, I met a nice guy from India who was incredibly happy that I understood his accent (my roommate is from India and I work with several Nepalis). I found out he has met the missionaries a few times and, by some incredibly random chance, I had in my pocket a pass-along card that I had picked up off the ground the night before, which I gave to him. As we paid for our stuff and headed out, he said, "It is very nice to meet you, Wes. Can I have your number? I would like to get in touch with you soon and ask you some questions." I hope we stay in touch.