This post is for my Computer

With distress and undying grief, I bid adieu to the former love of my life. My beloved computer...known lovingly as Ordi...has died. The screen no longer lights up...and it doesn't remember my settings either which is the equivalent to technological Alzheimer's, or just ignoring me. I find myself rather distraught, more so then when my first computer died. It was part of my life and I loved it, took care of it...and it forgot me. (And I'm not being dramatic.)

My beloved deceased computer

My beloved laptop was a symbol of my overseas life. It went to France, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, New York, Virginia, South Carolina, and Washington DC...and if we're counting layovers (which totally count in my book) we'd add extended periods of time in South Africa, Netherlands, Tanzania, and the UAE). It traveled further then many people which only made it a more significant part of my increasingly strange life.

Freshman year, freshman day, August 2007, sitting in the Catholic Relief Services Regional Southern Africa Office in Lusaka Zambia, across from my dad who was the deputy regional director at the time, I started my first online uni classes with Ordi. And it went all the way through college with me. I dragged it to many CRS offices when the Internet was sucky or nonexistent at home and I needed to take exams. I watched eight seasons of Gilmore Girls on that computer when it wasn't safe to leave our home in Pakistan. I wrote every college paper on that computer from August 2007 to July 2010. I skyped my family from uni in the States. And I blogged (albeit irregularly) with Ordi.

It lived such a rich computer life and with a severe overhaul, it could live on. But technology is only useful when it works so my treasured Ordi will be retired and a new, faster, smaller computer (which will go by Ordi II) will take it's place. And it will have big shoes to fill...my desceased had a 15 inch screen.