Online school has been a mess for everyone, but many people seem to overlook the most annoying aspect, in this columnist’s humble opinion – the computers themselves!

I have really bad luck with computers. I don’t know if it’s a personal thing or if the computers just suck, but I’m inclined to take the latter option because most of the time, they’ll just fail on you for no reason. Like, you’ll be using them just fine and on a whim they go, “sorry, but I don’t like you!” and become paperweights within seconds.

Well, I must be an unlikable person to laptops because I’ve ran through 3 of them during quarantine and the one I’m on right now, in which I’m typing  from, is clearly on its last legs. At least one of those was lent to me, so if I broke your laptop, uh, sorry!

There’s sort of a zero-sum game going on with these, cause here’s how it works. You buy an expensive laptop, expecting top tier of quality. It lasts just long enough for the warranty to expire, then as soon as that fateful day comes, it leaves you behind like you’re nothing. My first laptop I had in quarantine went this way. It worked great for about a year (before quarantine), started declining a few months after a year passed, then uncovered a whole slew of problems by the time quarantine began. 

Then one day, I turn it on, and all my files are missing. All of them. Naturally, my reaction is “what gives?” so I try to recover them. I figure it’s just a software issue and in the worst-case scenario I can just wipe it and start over. But then I try to turn it on the next day and it just… doesn’t turn on. Yeah, it had already had a charging issue by this time, but it coincidentally stopped charging at all at this point.

So, OK, I got another new computer. Been unused for a long while, so while it’s like new, it’s still “old”. Works great for a month or two! Then Windows tells me to update. What’s the worst that could happen? Well, the update stalls for an unreasonably long time. Then my computer runs out of battery. I try to restart it, but it just whimpers and gives up every time. I look up what happened. Turns out my computer got “bricked”. What does that mean? It means your computer has become a brick, a piece of plastic that is now useless and unfixable. Awesome!

By this point you’d naturally be enraged. So I buy a cheap, refurbished laptop, because, you know, diminishing returns and all. Also I don’t have millions of dollars to shell on these things. 

Was it worth the investment at all? Probably not because it kind of sucked from the get go . But I mean, talk about bad manufacturing. You hit it in the wrong spot on accident one time and it shatters and breaks.

With all this in mind all I can say is just: computer companies, you suck. Your products suck. Your service sucks. You are practically running the show during this pandemic yet you screw normal working class people over just to buy more of your crap. Well, this assembly line plastic garbage you sell expecting to scam more decent people into expanding your already exorbitant profits won’t last. We’ll build our own computers. And they’ll be GOOD. Who’s with me?

Oh right, that would cost even more money. Well, time to go outside for once I guess.