jennings rampage

C’mon, we all know Macs suck.

Surely by now you’ve heard the hilarious story of the county government in Virginia that wanted to sell about a thousand used iBook laptops for fitty bucks a pop. Hey, this article sums it up. It’s ancient history by this point as far as blogs go, but this just seems like it’ll have that timeless quality that’ll keep pundits scratching their van dykes for years to come. Oh, what a mob scene it was! To what depths has humanity sunk!

I’ve picked a little bit of a fight (and been outed as a bonafide Internet troll) over on my friend Wade’s blog in the comment section where he posted about this very same story. One of his commenters seemed to crystalize the standard spin on this story:

• These quote-computers-endquote are teh suck! Who would want a four-year-old iBook???
• OMFGZ!!! Teh rednecks are STAMPEDING! Yee haw suey!
• Why don’t they just sell ‘em on eBay, they’d get more CA$H that way.
• Oh my word, I’ve lost another perfectly good monocle, as I am completely astonished by the level of greed and lack of dignity that a human being must experience in order to submit to this sort of degradation, all in the name of, horror of horrors, a corporate consumer good. God bless America, INDEED.

It struck me pretty hard that anyone saying this sort of thing pretty clearly already has a computer, and probably can’t remember a time when they wanted a computer but didn’t have one. Well, I can. My first computer was a beat-up Commodore 64 that was used for bank hacking that my mom bought at a police auction. It had the serial port ripped out, to guarantee it couldn’t be used for evil ever again. My second computer was a gift from the headmaster of the private school that my mom worked her ass off to get me into. He noticed that I was his only student without a functioning home computer, and so he bought one for me, just so I could keep up with my class. Incredible man.

Without those computers, I can promise you that we wouldn’t be sitting here today chatting so enjoyably. Like, I wasn’t going to work at the old mill or anything, but I’d have been at a terrible disadvantage going into college and the job market without having my hands all over a computer from the age I did. Hell, I might not have made it as far as college without a computer in middle school and high school.

And so, it’s not hard for me to imagine that if I were an adorable and intellectually curious ten or eleven year-old and there was an opportunity for my mom to buy me a working used computer for a price she could afford, she’d have been there for me. And if it meant pissing herself to keep her place in line, or defending her spot in the queue from assholes however she needed to, I know she’d have done it. That’s how much my mother loved me, that’s how much she wanted me to succeed. (Please overlook my remarkable lack of success as we continue the story.)

So that’s why I’m frustrated — it seems that practically no one sees this story as testimony to how important it is for everyone to have a computer in today’s hurly-burly fast-paced society, and how desperate the poor are to gain access to that world. The only people who wield chairs or piss themselves to spend $50 on a computer worth maybe $300 are the people who don’t have the option to spend that extra $250. You’ll never catch me mocking them; it’s not easy being poor, obviously, but it is easy to take the dignity we have for granted.