The last month of my life has been a horror movie in terms of laptops, but a couple days ago, it finally had its happy ending.

A month ago, I accidentally spilled water on my 13” MacBook. The incident was so accidental that even a supreme being wouldn’t have seen it coming, but what was worse was my way of handling it: instead of immediately freaking out and detaching the battery, I carrier on using it for an hour or so, being visually misled by the keyboard of the MacBook into thinking that “there is no way any water could get in there” and “it’ll dry up in a few minutes.” Some keys started mis-functioning, and before I knew it, the water had reached my logic board and the laptop wouldn’t turn on after I did finally turn it off and detached the battery. Luckily, I was in India at this time — tech support heaven — so the family technician spent literally 20 hours unscrewing every part and drying it, and before I knew it, it turned on again.

But of course, everything in life has a catch. After we tested it for a while, the laptop automatically turned off. And then, some minutes later we figured out that if we didn’t press a key or use the mouse while booting up, it would automatically turn off. Worse, even after it turned on, it needed some feedback on the mouse or keyboard, or it would — again — turn off. The sleep function didn’t work as it should, and the laptop would simply just turn off after closing the lid. After spending a night trying to write a program that would automatically press a key at timed intervals and then learning that it was a hardware problem (i.e. something *literally* needed to be tapped) — not a software problem — I came upon the ingenious solution of putting a pin into the broken right shift key, which essentially stopped it from turning off, and didn’t interfere with my use because the key itself didn’t work.

That worked for a few days, until I learnt the side-effects: some of the other keys stopped working when Shift was pressed. So, I needed to find another replacement key. I spent the next fifteen days literally working with different pins in different keys and shutting it down before I had to transport it somewhere, which was time enough for me to get back to New Zealand and start considering options.

I had a few:

• Pay $300 to replace the keyboard/top section of the MacBook, and hope to god that fixes the 10 second shutdown + sleep problem.
• If it doesn’t, pay another $1,000 for a new logic board.
• What’s worse, I was warned by the tech person to “not replace it myself,” and knowing how inept I am with hardware, I knew I couldn’t, so if I went this route, I’d probably just have to give it to a tech repair shop here in New Zealand, and knowing how costly that is, I estimate that itself would set me back another $500.

Or:

• Sell the laptop in its broken condition (I guessed I’d get around $1,000NZD)
• And topping those funds, buy the 2.53GHz 15” MacBook Pro I’ve been dreaming about for the last few years.

Needless to say, I went the second route and purchased the new MacBook Pro. Financially, it may have been a little heavy, but at least I got to make the upgrade of my lifetime and what I ended up with was a perfect new laptop rather then something I tried to fix but broke more in the process or something which could — again — screw up any second. Specifically, my upgrade was the following:

• 13” -> 15”
• 2GB RAM -> 4GB RAM
• 250GB Hard Drive -> 500GB Hard Drive
• 2.4GHz -> 2.53GHz
• 2.5 hours battery life -> 7 hours battery life

All in all, I’ve been using this thing for the last couple of days, and love it to death. It’s the best computer I have ever used. I think the upgrade I got from it is worth the price-tag in and of itself, added with the perfect opportunity to do it, and that I could top it up using some of the funds from my previous laptop.

And my takeaway from this incident? I can’t say there were any in terms of its cause (“not keeping water around your laptop” is not one, because the bottle I spilled the water from wasn’t “around” it — I picked it up from a metre away and when I went to keep it back, it misaligned and dropped in a heartbeat, making a few drops hit the keyboard.) Although, I guess in the handling of it, I could have realized the seriousness of water spillage and freaked out and disconnected piece of electricity passing through it rather than just passively using it again like I did.

But life had a deeper takeaway in it for me. One involving certainty, valuing what you have, and not taking things — even your meaningless material possessions like laptops — for granted. You can be busy surfing YouTube clips and getting really angry at the buffering speed one day, and the next, you can be praying that the next time you try the On button, it somehow just magically turns on and everything is normal again. I of course had the shorter end of the stick with the laptop, but the fact that this misfortune in my life — the worst I’d had for maybe a couple years — involved a laptop rather a person in my life, my health, or my livelihood, makes me one of the lucky people on earth.

If this incident happened to me in New Zealand — among the lovely luxurious life I live and see people living around me — I would’ve freaked out and lost it. But it happened to me in India. When I would travel a mile from home, and notice the kid trying to get fed for today by looking for food in the trash can, or the father trying to make end’s meat by pedaling 20KMs a day as a cycle rickshaw driver, or the mother slaving off at washing clothes from the neighborhood so that she can feed her only child, I would feel a little less unfortunate about my situation. Soon enough, I started questioning why I got to be the “lucky foreigner with a half-working laptop” (an incident I would’ve otherwise in my normal habitat described as “the most unfortunate MacBook owner in the world”) when most people couldn’t even dream of having a laptop, let alone a half broken one.

People who live in Western society, like myself, are so fortunate to get carried away with our material goods, that we sometimes forget the fight for the basic necessities of life that some have to face. Our battles are rarely to do with getting food to be fed (or worse, to feed) or finding shelter to live. Instead, they involve fighting tech support, mourning over a broken gadget, dealing with the boss, coping with the unjustice done to us by a billion dollar company, worrying about losing half of our wealth from the stock market (despite the remaining half being substantially more than what most of the world will ever have). Our insignificant battles make us some of the most fortunate people to have ever lived on planet earth, and just thinking about that, it’s a wonder that anyone ever feels unfortunate about anything, let alone things so meaningless.