Okay, this is it

I’m doing it. Trying to write something on the Mac I bought early last December, the Mac that has been sitting around, hated and unwanted since the day it arrived. The laptop replacement purchase mistake. For four months I’ve been thinking that I’d have been better off just throwing $600 out the window. At least that way I might still be able to find some of the money in the trees. For those four months I’ve been soldiering on with my slow-as-molasses Toshiba, because anything was better than actually using the Mac.

What’s slower than molasses? Whatever it is, that’s what the Toshiba has become.

I’m still in the middle of my latest six-week write-something-every-day challenge. I sit down in the morning and write – sometimes for fifteen minutes, sometimes thirty, sometimes an hour. Then I try to load what I’ve written on to the website. If there’s a photo involved (which there often is) it can take up to a further hour just to load on to the site because the Toshiba is so clapped out, its gremlins slowing me down and defying me at every turn. Loading a post should take five minutes, maybe ten. Yesterday I was so frustrated by the process that I gave up, switched on the Mac, went to the admin section on my site and finished the job in a minute.

Just now I shifted the Toshiba off the desk and put the Mac on it. I am using LibreOffice (which, amongst other annoying things, does not allow me to save a document as a pdf) to write this entry, my fingers attempting to find their way around the Mac keyboard (which does not include page up, page down, home or end keys).

I’m giving it a week. If, after one week, I still hate everything about this stupid fucking Mac, I am going to use the Covid emergency stimulus money the government kindly shoved into my bank account this week to buy the Lenovo I probably should have bought last December. Then I’ll just hope I can sell this thing for at least a couple of hundred dollars if and when the lockdown ever ends.

Who knows? Maybe I’ll surprise myself. Maybe after a week I won’t hate it. Maybe I’ll frigging love it, wonder where it’s been all my life. I am not holding my breath.