Something truly awful has happened. What am I going to do? How will my life function? How will I sleep at night? Questions of this variety have been racing through my mind as I lie in bed contemplating my bad luck. Having lost it, my one and only love, the thing that gets me up in the morning and sends me to sleep, life now seems a struggle. An uphill struggle that I am destined to fail, losing my footing and slipping down the Hill of Life hitting my head on the Stones of Misfortune and grazing my knees on the Gravel of Hardship. You see my dear friends, my laptop, my beautiful blue, my azure acquaintance, is in disrepair.
A few days ago I was on my darling, using my time exceptionally well by reading the delightfully snidey and grammatically impressive Guardian comments and listening to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack, when my laptop began to warm up. It was all hot and bothered and making a disconcerting screeching sound.
"My sweet, what is wrong with you?" I cooed whilst rubbing my knee vigorously and holding my laptop close to my ear. There was no response.
"My bear in the big blue house, why are you tormenting me so?" I wailed. Still no response. And then, it shut down. Just like that. Without warning, the one thing that had kept me entertained, kept my head above water, closed down. I immediately tucked my laptop into bed and put it in the recovery position, also known as closed, and waited by its sickbed anxiously rocking myself back and forth, chewing my nails and rubbing my knees. After a few hours passed, and multiple trips to the toilet, I chanced it and turned it on. A horrifying message greeted my reddened and squinty eyes: "The system has detected that a cooling fan is not operating correctly"
My heart dropped. A cooling fan? I immediately sprang into action and acquired a beautiful, lush Japanese hand fan with a red design speckled with pink (it's my sisters, I promise) and set to work. I vigorously fanned the underside of the laptop whilst turning it on, hoping that it would whir back into life, the familiar hum of the hard-drive and roar of the fan taking me to my safe place; the one place where the outside world can't hurt me. Yet, the vigorous fanning was to no avail and I had to concede defeat. I needed a professional - quickly.
So, when the time presented itself I set off on a heroic adventure to save my laptop from the well-documented dangers of a cooling fan that is not operating correctly. Growing up we all heard about this. Our Mother's and Father's would say to us: "Do your homework or your cooling fan will not operate correctly" and "If you don't do that washing up you little devil then I'll cause your cooling fan to operate in an incorrect manner." Everyone knows how dangerous a non-operational cooling fan can be and I wasn't about to lose my laptop to this modern day disease. So off I beetled, following my nose to the Wizards of PC World.
I got there breathlessly; having ran all the way from Selly Park to the centre of Birmingham and said: "I need you to fix my laptop, stat!"
"Calm down young master, perhaps we can fix your laptop, perhaps we can't..." the little imp-like man behind the desk replied in a, quite frankly, unnecessarily enigmatic manner.
"What? You work at bloody PC World. The cooling fan is broken, can you replace it?" I replied.
"Hmmm" he said thoughtfully whilst stroking his misguided and ill-advised facial hair "maybe we can, given the right financial contribution from yourself. But such is life; the winds of misfortune may blow."
"Can I just ask you to stop with the mystery bullshit? I know I called you a PC World Wizard earlier on in the article but I can't stand this attempt at tension you're trying to create and I can't be arsed to keep writing your dialogue in this manner. Every PC World technician worth their salt clearly knows how to change a fucking cooling fan it's really not that big of a deal." I said.
"Oh right yeah, sure thing mate. It will be 50 quid for the labour costs and around 20 quid for the parts. It'll take around ten days and you can pay when you pick it up."
"Brilliant, cheers mate." I said whilst handing over the laptop in a matter-of-fact manner.
And that was the end of that. It's actually fine without my laptop. I wrote this whilst in the new library in Birmingham which is wonderful and I've just spent my time a lot more wisely by reading books, exercising and actually speaking to people face-to-face. So, all that other stuff, particularly at the start, was actually just grossly over-exaggerated for the purposes of this article. I'm sure you probably feel incredibly cheated and duped as I know it was extremely realistic and quite alarming, but don't worry, it's fine. I'm fine.
Probably.