Sunday evening as Tiffany and I were playing Uno over the internet and Alex was sitting next to me, looking over my shoulder, I dropped the laptop off the arm of the couch. I'm not sure whether I was getting up or just adjusting my posture, but there it went . . . it rolled backward onto the carpet. It landed softly upright, then rolled backward, with the screen closing as it went. Watching the soft impact on the soft carpet, I was very thankful. Until I picked it up and opened it. I could still hear the Uno game going on, but the LCD screen was cracked. Alex immediately yelled "It wasn't me!" Of course it wasn't Alex . . . it was completely my fault.
That night, I searched the internet for a replacement screen. I found two websites that had them. One was $270, and the other was $125, with shipping. I had not heard of either site, and both looked a little shaky. ENU, my favorite PC parts supplier, does not list laptop screens on their website, so they likely do not carry them. I did not see any similar laptops on Craigslist for parts.
Monday morning I went to Costco to exchange the laptop (it is only about 60 days old), and they exchanged it with no questions asked. Literally . . . they never asked what was wrong with it! Because it was originally purchased in Oregon, I had to pay $43 in sales tax, and I walked out with a new laptop. Good deal.
Alex was concerned that Santa had made our laptop, so Costco wouldn't exchange it. I told Alex that Santa had bought it at Costco, but Alex asserted that Santa makes everything. Finally, I explained to Alex that Santa called Costco and asked them to exchange our laptop, and that Santa was going to make a new one for Costco to replenish their stock. This Santa stuff is getting complicated.
Before exchanging the laptop, I had thought long and hard about what data I might be losing off the hard drive. Of course, there is the obvious security concern with giving Acer back the hard drive, but I am not very worried about that. I trust both Costco and Acer. Because I was concerned with theft, I have not stored anything important on the laptop. I should have plugged an external monitor into it and checked, but I didn't think that was necessary.
This morning, I realized that I lost about 8 hours' worth of writing. I have been considering starting a Mechanical Engineering blog, and have been writing entries up ahead of time; I think I had about a dozen. And they were all stored on my laptop desktop. There is no way I can recreate those entries. I will start over, but I will not be able to recreate them.
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