Laptop one, sorted!

Is there anything more exciting in life than sitting down to write a column on a spanking new laptop compooter that you not only own, but got for an absolute steal? Admittedly, there probably should be, but it’s a measure of how dull my day-to-day existence has become that this is the most invigorating, breath-taking, exhilarating, hair-raising, thrilling, spine-tingling, wild, zestful, eye-popping, (yes, of course it has a thesaurus) and downright intoxicating thing I have done all week. Apart from getting scuttered yesterday, which while intoxicating, certainly wasn’t invigorating, breath-taking, etc. and so on.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “Here we go. Another trendy journalist who insists on writing big long articles about how boring his life is, while simultaneously managing to convey the impression that it’s actually very mysterious and exciting.”
Eh? Oh.
Well, even if it was a lengthy whine about how my weekly visits to George Best’s house for naked tickle fights with his wife have become a bit of a drag, you’d have come to the wrong place.
No, today Alex will have to make her own fun because I’m busy masturbating over my new laptop. Not literally, of course. It doesn’t have a lube-guard yet.
Now while it would be arrogant of me to expect everyone to remember the article I wrote four years ago chronicling the manner in which I “acquired” my last PC, the many girls who I assume cut out and laminate my column each fortnight probably will.
To cut a long story short: a big fat juicy PC fell off the back of a lorry and somehow found its way into my home, whereupon I gave a man I didn’t know far less money for it than it was actually worth, at which point he left and we never spoke to or saw each other again.
A behemoth of a machine, in terms of size and what I am reliably informed is resolution, the monitor would dwarf any multiplex screen, while the hard-drive was so big and cumbersome that it had to be lifted into the house through an upstairs window using a complex system of ropes, levers and pulleys.
As technology went, I was told, its capabilities were limitless. And for four happy years it never gave me an ounce of trouble as I completely ignored 99% of its potential and used it almost exclusively to churn out twaddle like this and surf the Internet for porn.
In recent weeks, however, The Beast has started playing up. The once soporific hum of the hard-drive was replaced by the kind of jarring cacophony more readily associated with the starting grid of a Formula One grand prix, while the monitor began flickering constantly, until finally giving up the ghost entirely. And as for the keyboard – well, how anything that isn’t a receptacle could contain such a disturbingly large volume of breadcrumbs, cheese, crisps, tea, coffee, beer, wine, cigarette ash, dust and dandruff, and yet still function, is a miracle of science that I’m not even going to attempt to unravel.
And so it came to pass that I recently found myself whingeing to a mate about the misery of having to fork out a load of cash on a replacement machine. “A new computer?” says he. “Sure don’t bother wasting a shedload of money on one of those. I’ve a spare laptop at home that I never use, you can have that.”
Naturally sceptical about such a random act of kindness, I did what any man in my position would do and immediately assumed he was offering me some worthless heap of junk that was even more decrepit than the one I was attempting to replace. I was after a decent laptop, I stressed. Thanks for the offer, but it’d probably be less hassle to get a new one.
“Well okay, but this one should be fine,” he shrugged. “It’s been sitting under my bed at home for nearly a year and I’ve never even taken it out of the box.”
I was agog. Here was a man with an unused laptop sitting in a box under his bed, who was offering it to me. “How much do you want for it?” I asked him.
“You can have it for nothing,” he replied. “I got it from my old job and they never asked for it back. Sure I have another one now that I never use either. Come around and pick it up tomorrow.”
“But I can’t just take it, I have to give you something for it,” I argued, unconvincingly.
“Okay,” says he. “Buy me a pint and we’ll call it quits.”
And so it came to pass that I became the proud owner of a dinky new computer for the princely sum of the price of a pint of Stella, somewhere in the region of a grand less than the recommended retail price.
What’s more it’s sleek, it’s portable and it works. Its desktop is unsullied by the myriad obscene images various cohorts insist on sending me with monotonous regularity (thanks lads, keep ’em coming). The Favourites section of my Internet homepage is devoid of frivolous pornographic clutter and contains only the bare necessities of an austere life: Betfair.com, The Racing Post and the Irish Times Online. It must surely follow that every single article I write on this pristine new machine will be an absolute zinger.
Not counting this one, obviously.