I will love you and hug you and squeeze you and pet you and feed you and shower you with love forever and ever and ever and ever

Back in November of 2007, my trusty, ugly, sturdy, business-inclined, bento-inspired IBM (yes, IBM, just before the mainlanders working for Lenovo got their grubby little hands on it) ThinkPad T43p halted to the point where I could no longer use it on a regular basis.

There's a didactic lecture somewhere in there about not downloading or streaming videos of Japanese girls puking in each others' mouths or elephant beastiality or Brazilian fart porn or German scheisse videos, but we've all heard it a thousand times, so save your breath for yelling at the hippies wasting their time in the trees.

It was at that point that I purchased my current Dell Inspiron 1520, with which I am unsatisfied (the discount price I received was the main reason I justified the purchase - that, and my unquenched thirst for...um...webcast lectures.) It's perfectly functional, sure, but not any prettier than the ThinkPad, in my opinion, and it's a monstrous brick - 6.5 lbs. versus the ThinkPad's 5.1 lbs. - that happens to perform calculations billions of times faster than the human mind.

Only recently did I decide that I would cut off yet another corner of my deep-fried, high-fructose corn syrup soul and throw it into the parched orifice of Beelzebub himself, Bill Gates. Actually, make that Steve Ballmer - it's so much more entertaining/literal to the analogy. I purchased a cheap-ass copy of XP Pro with SP2 on eBay, and by cheap-ass I mean at the low Helena's Handjob price of $130 as opposed to the retail, Big Bertha's Blowjob cost of $270. I purchased it since I did not have the disc used to install my copy of Windows on the ThinkPad.

Over the weekend, I opened the ThinkPad for the first time in a true semester to try to boot Windows from my new CD.

My screen now putters to death at totally random times. So not only is my software screwed, my hardware decided to give me the proverbial shaft as well. A little part of me died because I thought all was lost - my favorite piece of equipment in my life thus far (yes, it's better than the Wii. I said it. Here's a sack of stones; 10 points for the head, 50 points for each nut).

But in a conversation with Nick, I was reminded of the fact that these things tend to come with Warranty, or the "Cover Our Ass Documentation." I told him that warranty on the ThinkPad had expired, because I thought that surely, after almost three years after purchase, there was no way the warranty was still good - standard warranty is one year. But just for kicks, I decided to look it up on the Lenovo (ugh) website...

"OHHH MAHHH GAAWWWDD HOLY DEEP-FRIED CHICKEN SHIT ON A STICK THE WARRANTY IS THREE YEARS"

Dear The Scholar's Workstation (they use "The" in the same way that I use "The University of California"): FIX MY SCREEN, BITCHES. I GOT WARRANTY ON THAT SHEEEEIT.

Moral of the story: German Scheisse videos...I mean, webcast lectures, are not the evil things that the higher-ups say they are. They give you what you need to move on in life, despite the fact that you pay over $8,000 per year for their services.

Real moral of the story: Check the warranty before you freak out.