The IRONY of Owning a Laptop

I can still remember how excited I looked last year when my ever supportive father told me I’ll be having a new laptop. Finally my rusty, old desktop PC will rest in peace!

The idea of owning a laptop hit me three years ago, during the start of the second semester. It was the time when I realized that the course I took will have me fed up with a lot of paperworks and requirements. I usually make my assignments and projects in nearby computer shops. I always get distracted by how many desktop icons appear in the screen. Oftentimes I get tempted to play games. I end up paying five times more.

So I nagged my ever supportive father to buy me one, eventually postponing my former request to replace my equally rusty, old mobile phone (which I had been with since I was in high school, good riddance). 

And after a month, I received a brand new laptop. It is not the “coolest” model in the market, but I [forced myself to] like it.

Irony#1

My younger brother would sometimes sneak up on my room  and use my laptop (naturally, I was so protective of it) to play online games with his classmates. After once discovering him exploiting my “property” without my knowledge, I scrapped him of his innocent ecstasy by placing a long password which in no way he will ever guess. At first I though I triumphed. 

But after a week, I caught him playing again. My initial question was not “Why are you playing?” but “How the f*** did you guess my password, you twerp?”. He grinned at me and showed me a copy of the LH tabloid. Oh. So he knew.

But days later, we quarreled over the issue of him not informing me about his games. And worse, I discovered that he was secretly downloading games and installing them on my main drive. (The twerp! So that explains why my top’s going nuts!). And we quarreled for another 10 days, until he got his own laptop.

Irony#2 aka The Classroom Irony

I know that I am not the only one who has a laptop in our class. But I do not understand why, whenever we have a group activity, I seem to be the most popular laptop owner and everyone starts to point fingers at me “Si Jet na lang yung powerpoint. Dalhin mo laptop mo bukas, please.” With my classmates’ pleading faces (and the girls’ [pa]cute giggles) I could not say “No. Mabigat. Hassle.” I just nod. To think that in one way, I am helping the group.

But it’s not the weight of the laptop that bothers me. It’s the idea that we have an internet room and only a few seems to be aware of it. I hope laptop dependence will not happen again in the future.

Just like Spider Man, owning a laptop comes with great responsibility (and patience). It’s not entirely cool to have one. In a developing country like the Philippines, it’s more of a “need” than a “want”.