Your laptop crashes.  Literally it hits the hard floor with a bang.  You find out that the hard drive can be transferred but, alas, the motherboard is dead.  You need a new laptop.

You go to a store, buy a new laptop, get help transferring your files from the old laptop, take your laptop home, do the quick start up, and go about the business of your life, with a sense of competence and peacefulness. Perhaps you whistle while you work.

I am not you. I am The Nothing Expert, and I never whistle when it comes to technology.

I snarl.

“I want to do this quickly,” I spit at my husband, Jerome the Great and Good. Jerome is an expert on buying anything and getting the most for his money. Unlike me, Jerome would never refer to the broken laptop’s Mother Board as the Mother-F—ker Board.

“I don’t want any hassles with this new laptop, ” I say. “ I want them to set everything up, teach me what I need to know, and let me hit the ground running.  Also, this time, I do not want to cry a lot and throw things.”

And so Jerome and I went forth and shopped; it seemed like forty days and forty nights. We went to Best Buy…to Staples….online …and then back to Staples and so on until we found the Store with the best price.

And finally we bought a laptop, and a service contract package, and a virus package, and a cloud package, and Microsoft Office 365 Package because now we were going to use Windows 8. The Store assured us that we would receive lots of help from them.

We met them. He was Bill, the Tech Guy, whose daily hours were something like 4 p.m. to 4:17 p.m.  For another hundred dollars, Bill was going to transfer all of the stuff from the old laptop to the new laptop and explain all of the new Windows stuff to us.

“Bill, when will I have my laptop loaded up and ready to go?” I asked. I wanted to add the word, “sweetie,” but I refrained.

“In a day or two,” said Bill.

Jerome and I were delighted that Bill could transfer files from our old laptop to our new one.  We left both laptops in Bill’s loving care. Jerry and I might have even left the Store holding hands.

The next day Bill did not come in to work. He was ill.

In the Store where we bought our laptop, there were many, many people who were proficient at selling laptops. There were no people, other than Bill, who were good at fixing laptops. And so, our eager new laptop sat right next to our sad old laptop, on their shelf, in the Store, untouched.

Then Bill had family trouble.

I stopped talking to Jerome, the Great and Good. I started using more bad words whenever the subject of the new laptop came up. Jerome put his head in his hands, and he was sad.

After an eternity, Bill came back. He handed over the new fully loaded laptop, and after spending about 51 seconds explaining its new features to us, he moved on to his other chores.

As Jerome drove me and our new laptop home, I swaddled it in my arms and cooed to it.  I promised to take care of it and not drop it on the floor, like I did to its predecessor.

I didn’t drop my new laptop.  All I did was try to use it.  Will this marriage survive? Is there any connection between motherboards and waterboards? Tune in to my next post.