The wee hours

This morning, I got up at 5am to buy a laptop.

Thank you, I hope your collective gasping will lead to a whole bunch of adverse weather conditions to torment the damn butterfly that keeps creating climatic chaos by flapping its wings.

Some people like to suffer for their art. Me? I like to think that my suffering is the art itself. Basically, what happened was that yesterday I discovered there was a crazy IBM Employee purchase deal involving a very limited number of laptops going for half price. So of course, being the overzealous and misguided romantic that I am, I decided to purchase one for my girlfriend Jenny despite knowing full well that I am more likely to receive expressions of incredulity and surprise rather than the lavish praise that my warped geek-imagination would have me believe was coming my way.

Long story short, I took advantage of a little bit of, shall we say, insider knowledge, to ensure that I was guaranteed to get one of these things – ie. I had to get up really, really early to beat everybody else. Wow. I am so smart.

As it turns out, I was the 5th person to make an order. 5th dammit! Apparently there was one guy who made an order 10 minutes after the promotion went live just before 3am in the morning. (At least I can tell Jenny that there were at least 4 other people in IBM who were even more desperate than me).

So here I am at the end of the day, and what do I have to show for my efforts? Nada. Zip. Zilch. They didn’t call me to confirm the order, and my Jenny is still sans-ThinkPad. I’m thinking that the other 4 guys ahead of me just bought them all and are probably listing them on eBay even as we speak (ok, ok… as I write, and you read… yes, even with the inherent time difference between when I was writing this and when you get around to reading it – there were quite a few laptops… yes, I have also considered the metaphysical implications of my addressing you when you might not even be reading this at all, kinda like that jazz about sounds of trees falling in forests and one hand clapping, etc.)

For the fellow geeks out there, the model that I picked up (supposedly, *ahem* pending a certain phone call *ahem*) is a ThinkPad X40 ultraportable with 12.1″ screen, 1.3GHz processor, 40GB hard drive, 256MB RAM, Windows XP Pro and all the usual accoutrements such as wireless, modem, USB ports and the like. Priced at $1,125.62 (Less with salary sacrifice option.)