An Ode to My Work Laptop

I started at Collective Digital Studio (now Studio71) in 2012 as the month of December awoke from it’s yearly slumber. I was handed a computer. A Macbook Pro Retina. That Retina part was new, as was how thin and light it was. Instantly I realized it was the best computer I had ever used. That computer has been with me every day since then, and it died today. A little piece of me did too.

My Macbook Pro lived a hard life. I asked a lot from it. Not “a lot” in the sense that I managed to tax any part of it’s excessive specs, as I’m a developer and I just edit text files all day, but I brought it everywhere. It was thrown in countless bags, eaten over for countless meals (but never spilled on), taken out at countless TSA checkpoints, and even sat on a couple of times. It was a tray, it was a paper weight, and it was a way to block my face while I laughed at some guy from a different company farting during a sales presentation at my office. Oh, and I worked on it. Tons of times. I coded the first version of the API we use at Collective Digital Studio, typed out a ton of emails, and planned the reboot of the tech team we had in 2012 in to the amazing tech team we have today.

It Facetime’d with me. It Hangout’d with me. It brew install’d with me. It XCode’d with me. It Sublime Text’d with me. It “I’m Googling that because there is no way a piece of software is actually named…oh, it’s a Node.js thing”’d with me. We saw Google IOs, f8s, Clojure/Wests, and Variety Big Data conferences. We watched a lot of YouTube. We wrote a bunch of code that hopefully helped make YouTube a better place.

I’ll miss you buddy. You died in a really weird way where you just kept restarting all the time which was super frustrating…and you’re a huge asshole for dying a month or two before the next model of Macbook Pros will be announced, but that’s OK. The intern was using a computer just like you and I took his and imaged it with my backup. Once I put my cover on it will be just like you didn’t die at all. My stickers will even be back! Ok, I gotta make up all the time from yesterday when I was yelling at you and then replacing the intern’s files with my files…but you were a good friend so I’m going to write “broken” on a Post-It Note and leave you in this cabinet. A fitting tribute! Maybe one day we’ll get you repaired, or maybe one day someone will throw this cabinet away and forget to open it first, but either way you should know that I loved you.

Shit.

Which one of these was the broken one?