A Laptop for Nobody

W. Bruce Cameron

(Editor’s Note: The following column was originally published in 2008.)

I believe that computers were invented to make our lives easier. My own computer doesn’t agree.

We’ve tried relationship counseling through hours and hours of technical support. In the end, though, my computer just doesn’t like me.

In shopping for a new PC, a video ad for a very popular laptop caught my eye. People in jumpsuits bounce weightlessly around inside an aircraft cabin, tossing the laptop back and forth like a Frisbee — and guess what: It still works, even under weightless conditions! What a surprise!

My question is, who is this ad for? Based on how much I had to eat over the holidays, I’m not likely to wind up weightless anytime soon. And if I ever were on a commercial flight and found myself floating upside down inside the airplane, I probably wouldn’t consider that the ideal moment to write my mother an e-mail.

The same company has an advertisement featuring a deep-sea diver being lowered into a large water tank by some sort of crane — again, not a situation most of us are going to encounter on a daily basis. The suit the guy is wearing has a diving helmet and looks like it could go 20,000 leagues under the sea, though the water tank is probably only 18 feet deep or so. The implication seems to be that you should be prepared for all contingencies, so that if the bottom drops out of a pool and you find yourself underneath a mile of ocean, you’ll be properly dressed.

You’ll also have the right laptop! That’s right, the guy in the diving bell takes his laptop down to the bottom of the pool with him and, using his stubby, gloved fingers, types away at it.

While I’m not likely to try something like this myself - I don’t own a diving helmet, or a water tank with a crane over it for that matter - I can see a lot of reasons why owning a PC that can fall in the pool and still work would have a lot of advantages.

For example, let’s say a bunch of your weightless friends came over to play a little laptop Frisbee, and one of them threw too hard and it sailed over your head and landed in your 18-foot-deep water tank.

You could just dive in and send him an e-mail asking him to be more careful!

Except that the laptop doesn’t work underwater. It doesn’t even function when you crane yourself up out of the water tank and drain the thing. This is an advertisement for a feature that doesn’t exist!

I already own a PC that doesn’t perform to expectations, so I don’t know how this commercial is going to entice me to buy this particular brand. The message seems to be: “Buy our laptop PC! The computer that doesn’t function when wet - and we can prove it.”

In my opinion, if you want to sell me a PC, you should demonstrate that it will function even after I’ve smashed my fist on the keyboard yelling: “No! No! Don’t tell me you lost that file, not that file!”

It should be able to survive falling off the table as I unplug the LAN connection for the fourth time in an hour because every time I phone technical support I get a new person who wants me to try every single step in his script before he gives up and hangs up on me.

It should be capable of shrugging off a direct hit from a shotgun blast, not because I’ve ever fired a weapon at my computer or even own a shotgun, but because whenever I’m in a rush to finish something or print something or do something important, it knows to pick that precise moment to put an hourglass on my screen and just hang there, daring me to fight back. And one of these days, I’m going to snap. I’m going to yell “pull,” toss it up like a Frisbee and shoot it down like a duck.

As I said, my computer doesn’t like me — and maybe I don’t like it much, either.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com.

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