I expected my new laptop—a MacBook Air, space gray—to arrive yesterday. But
the delivery man from the courier company couldn’t find my home address; I’d
later learn he didn’t ask around. The website thus registered the issue as “The
company named in the Company Name field on the transport label is not the entity
located at the physical address.” I was supposed to “provide new or updated
consignee address.” Another person reading the notice would imagine I lived
somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle.
This morning I went to the
warehouse facility in GenSan, about 200 meters from my clinic. The security
guard asked me to wait outside: they have my package. The laptop was wrapped in
a brown box, which was wrapped by a thick transparent plastic. I placed the
package in the backseat of the car, thanked the warehouse people, and drove to
another hospital to see a patient.
I hadn't planned on getting a new
computer. My old MacBook Air, around seven years old, remains functional. Sure,
it’s a bit slow at times, when too many tabs are opened, or when I activate
Garage Band by accident. There are moments when a restart is required. But the
machine gets things done—Zoom meetings, Keynote or PowerPoint slides, Word or
Pages, web browsing, and Netflix. I drag it in my clinics and use it for my
consultancy and faculty work. It is only about 10 to 20 percent less efficient
than when I had bought it at Robinsons Manila with my first salary; this was on
my first year internal medicine residency. I remember that afternoon: my friend
Racquel Bruno accompanied me after work. She said, “It feels like Christmas
morning.” Her MacBook Air, she tells me, is still alive and kicking. We used our
Macs on mortality reviews, meta-analyses, and the many paper work and researches
we had to submit.
My old Mac is special to me. It has been with me on my overseas trips for
conferences. It has proven a trustworthy company in presentations, lectures, and
audits. I wrote papers, essays, blog posts, and stories on it. I recorded my
podcasts with its built-in QuickTime player. I used it for my diplomate exam in
medical oncology. So it pained me when, on October 5, vertical lines appeared in
the screen’s center. Forums in the internet said it could be an LCD error, which
requires replacement of the screen. It could also be a motherboard issue, which
needs a special restart (it didn’t work). I was forced to get a new one.
I borrowed my brother Sean’s laptop, which runs on Windows, to tide
things through. I reached out to a schoolmate from Notre Dame who fixes Apple
products at a minimal fee. Just when I was about to meet Jeff, the vertical
lines had disappeared. The screen looked normal. MacBook Airs are self-healing,
after all.
I had just finished transferring all files from the old to
the new Mac, and I’m writing this post so I could get used to the keyboard. For
the file transfer, I used Apple’s Migration Assistant, which clones the old to
the new. It took 30 minutes to complete the entire process. Sean made me a cup
of lavender tea for the meantime. I also entertained myself with an Elizabeth
Bowen story, “Mrs. Windermere.” Sean said, “Daw nami man ang laptop mo, Manong,
ah. Nami iya color.”
