Orpazula Andres Martinez
E
i
.
My first laptop was love at first sight. When I saw it sitting on my brother’s desk, I knew it would be mine. And that’s how it turned out, and the laptop returned my love and didn’t have a single fault. Day after day, hour after hour, we’d spend together, at night we’d sleet together. He was the only friend I knew who wouldn’t betray me, who would adapt himself to my moods and help me with everything. He always knew everything. He never played with my emotions, and was always by my side even at the most difficult moments. We weren’t ashamed of each other, all my friends knew him, and he always returned my love, unconditional love. Even during our first fight I didn’t leave him alone. He had a strange form of courtship. He would always wait on my desk and blink at me. It was a kind of magic that always worked, and I always came to him. We were together until the wee hours and spent days and nights together. During holidays and vacations we cooked meals together, and in the evening I’d cook his favorite food for him. It was a really dreamlike love story, until one day we had to part. I thought this relationship would last longer, that it was true love, but in the end he betrayed me and went back to my brother. I felt broken, and I can’t ever trust another laptop which tries to hypnotize me, but I knew that each one is special and give the others a chance too.
Michael Pletinsky
E
i
.
About 4 years ago I was working as a freelance designer, developing a website and an image for an Israeli entrepreneur setting up a company in Vietnam. At each of the meetings, held in his bourgeois house in a pastoral village in the center of the country, I would arrive in a scratched and falling apart Fiat Uno, with a shabby notebook in my hand to write down his comments. And he was sitting in his slippers with his shiny laptop, pitying me. At our fifth meeting he got up, went to the cupboard and took out a laptop case. Out of the case he took out a slim and absolutely sexy Toshiba Portégé and gave it to me. “Listen”, he said in a kind of businessman’s arrogance, “I don’t like to see you coming here with your notebook. Here, have a laptop”. I was as excited as a 4 year old child going to the amusement park, but this was over very quickly, when I found that the keyboard language was Vietnamese, and all the keys were corroded. The computer was so old that the Windows it was equipped with moved slower than a Ferris wheel. I told him “thanks”, returned the toy to the case and opened my notebook again. Because, as they say in Russian, the only place you get free cheese is in a mousetrap. By the way, my girlfriend recently bought herself a new Protégé, and it’s one of the most amazing computers around. Pity it’s not mine.
55