A Brief History of the Rowland Laptop

We got a new laptop! Woohoo! God is so good!

In order for you to understand the greatness of this story, you need a little history lesson:

Once upon a time I worked at a camp for an entire summer and decided I would save my meager (VERY meager) earnings to purchase a new laptop to replace the one I had for my first two years of college which had recently taken to crashing every month or so (I mean a total and utter CRASH). Unfortunately, being a teenage girl in outlet-ridden, beach-bordered, crab-shack lovin' Maine, my paychecks were not necessarily saved as they should have been. Fortunately, God saw my need and overlooked my irresponsibility and introduced me to a girl who desperately wanted to get rid of her one-year-old laptop. I desperately wanted a laptop - see where this is going? She gave me a remarkable deal and I was, once again, happy.

After about two years this laptop began to render itself useless by it's shoddy wireless ability (and that only with an external card - that picked up next to no signal) and some various other problems. I dealt with it for another year and a half before my wonderful in-laws offered us a deal - our shoddy laptop for their shoddy laptop - which had much better wireless capability and a brand new motherboard (being that the former one had been recently replaced by Dell - for a third time). We took the deal and I was once again happy until the new motherboard inexplicably died once again only five months later - was replaced and did so again last month (only four months later this time). Dell, avoiding our request that the warranty be honored and this time-proven lacky of a laptop be replaced, "fixed" it twice more, only the last time proved to be too much for our poor friend and it refused to be resuscitated. The in-laws stepped in once more and offered us back the previously shoddy, yet still functioning, original laptop. And then it, too, bit the dust.

Tired of having no convenient laptop, I finally wrote a strongly-worded, yet respectful e-mail to Dell demanding that they step up, stand behind their product, and replace it. And - here's the crazy part - they said OK! Finally! They were going to replace it with a refurbised "comparable" model.

Only what we received via DHL today was far from a "comparable" model. Rather, they replaced our piece of shiny junk with a model that is worth TWICE what the original was. It has shiny new features, such as a built-in webcam and a thumprint reader (which I will probably never use but will always think is cool). In short, it is everything I wanted in a laptop, but thought I'd have to wait a couple more years for, until we had our debt under control. And yet, God, in his infinite goodness, has provided it now.

Now whether to sing the praises of Dell, we shall wait and see. As you may have noticed, my happiness in the laptop situation is not always well-founded. I'll let you know.