The charms of the consumer help-line are few and far between, but this winter I was blessed with a Christmas miracle: after months of maintenance calls, telephone wait lines and soul-crushing elevator music, the Dell Technical Support Team chose to grant my wish in the form of a new “Studio 1515” laptop.
The reason for the benevolence of my Calcutta-based friends was vague; perhaps they were tired of getting my calls-I’m sure the staff knows me by name at this point. Perhaps the globalization that brings a Texas-based computer company to a cubicle in India had sprinkled some Christmas spirit across the west-Asian subcontinent; or maybe they’d just taken pity on me–after all, hell hath no fury like the IT support victim. But at any rate, the offer was made, I gladly accepted, and not long after December 25th the UPS man showed up on my doorstep with that glorious corrugated cardboard box, emblazoned with a message of hope for my computing future: “Dell- Yours is Here.”
However this is not an article about the chaos of the IT help line at Dell computer, but one about what exactly I received in the mail from my favorite PC company this winter- or, rather, what I did not receive.
This is because I, like every college student, Generation-Y member, or frequenter of the independent coffee shop scene, find myself perpetually wrapped in the cutthroat debate that stands poised to define our generation: Mac or PC?
I should begin with a disclaimer; I am not a computer person, I know very little about hard drives and screen resolution, and I have no idea what a motherboard does. However, being an American under the age of 70- and what’s more, one with a Facebook account- I seem to find myself in front of the computer for a good deal of my waking hours typing, clicking, and profile-picturing away. Perhaps this is why I’ve grown so attached to the little plastic box on which I check my e-mails and upload my online assignments- after all, we’ve spent enough time together to almost justify romanticizing a laptop the way a member of a past generation might his hot-rod or his Little-Deuce Coupe or whatever else it was that the Beach Boys were singing about.
So, that said, I, like everyone else in my generation, have picked a side in the great debate- and apparently an unfashionable one at that, judging by the smug disdain of a campus filled with the hip and the trendy, all toting their MacBooks, and their Powerbooks, and whatever other adorably designed computer software Steve Jobs has bestowed upon us this week.
Such is the life of the PC owner- hiding in the shadows with my apparently inferior computer, shamed into self-consciousness over what is ultimately a glorified household appliance. There’s a particular style of disdain, a unique expression of smug superiority that the Macintosh-bearing crowd reserves for the rest of us; even if you can’t quite catch them at it, you can always feel that piercing gaze, and almost hear that mocking voice:
“I just really feel like it’s a more user-friendly experience.” They must think to themselves. “I really prefer the editing features- it’s just necessary because I do a lot of amateur photography and graphic design work; my Mac just really reflects my lifestyle.”
I’d made all the excuses- “it’s the same to me,” “it has such a bigger screen,” “I actually PCs better,” but ultimately to no avail- I’d condemned myself to tote about an ongoing token of my lack of computing finesse, and no excuse could redeem me, because it is, ultimately, agreed that Macs probably do work better, crash less, operate faster and are more user-friendly, and so on and so forth. Thus, I had no option but to accept begrudging defeat at the hands of my self-righteous peers- that is, of course, until that blessed package arrived at my door last month.
Suddenly I was awash in all the features, all the bells and whistles of a brand new and irrefutably beautiful navy-blue and shiny chrome laptop- but best of all, it simply worked faster and better than any other computer. Having come equipped with the excessively hyped Windows 7, I was dubious about whether it would be better than my old laptop, which had come with the similarly advertised (and, as it turned out, detestably bad Windows Vista just one year before; but once I began to use it, I was hooked.
Everything you saw in those obnoxious round the clock commercials is true- you can do the sync the computers together thing, you can do the pop your windows into equal halves of the screen thing, you can do just about anything, it seems; I’m a PC and it sure feels like Windows 7 was my idea.
You can click, you can drag, you can zoom, you can turn, and you can literally plug and play because the moment you open your laptop, the welcome screen is immediately there to greet you. This is not the snail-paced junk that’s always inspired you to buy a new computer just so you could ravage your current one with a baseball bat a la Office Space, but rather a smooth, sleek, sexy beast of a computer. But best of all, of all its tools and tricks, Windows 7 has just about everything that a Mac does, with a few extras of its own (and all for about $780 less, of course). So now, finally, I can trawl the coffee shops around Capitol Hill with pride, or confidently type away on campus without feeling the disdain of a depressingly large subculture of technological self-righteousness.
The reason for the benevolence of my Calcutta-based friends was vague; perhaps they were tired of getting my calls-I’m sure the staff knows me by name at this point. Perhaps the globalization that brings a Texas-based computer company to a cubicle in India had sprinkled some Christmas spirit across the west-Asian subcontinent; or maybe they’d just taken pity on me–after all, hell hath no fury like the IT support victim. But at any rate, the offer was made, I gladly accepted, and not long after December 25th the UPS man showed up on my doorstep with that glorious corrugated cardboard box, emblazoned with a message of hope for my computing future: “Dell- Yours is Here.”
However this is not an article about the chaos of the IT help line at Dell computer, but one about what exactly I received in the mail from my favorite PC company this winter- or, rather, what I did not receive.
This is because I, like every college student, Generation-Y member, or frequenter of the independent coffee shop scene, find myself perpetually wrapped in the cutthroat debate that stands poised to define our generation: Mac or PC?
I should begin with a disclaimer; I am not a computer person, I know very little about hard drives and screen resolution, and I have no idea what a motherboard does. However, being an American under the age of 70- and what’s more, one with a Facebook account- I seem to find myself in front of the computer for a good deal of my waking hours typing, clicking, and profile-picturing away. Perhaps this is why I’ve grown so attached to the little plastic box on which I check my e-mails and upload my online assignments- after all, we’ve spent enough time together to almost justify romanticizing a laptop the way a member of a past generation might his hot-rod or his Little-Deuce Coupe or whatever else it was that the Beach Boys were singing about.
So, that said, I, like everyone else in my generation, have picked a side in the great debate- and apparently an unfashionable one at that, judging by the smug disdain of a campus filled with the hip and the trendy, all toting their MacBooks, and their Powerbooks, and whatever other adorably designed computer software Steve Jobs has bestowed upon us this week.
Such is the life of the PC owner- hiding in the shadows with my apparently inferior computer, shamed into self-consciousness over what is ultimately a glorified household appliance. There’s a particular style of disdain, a unique expression of smug superiority that the Macintosh-bearing crowd reserves for the rest of us; even if you can’t quite catch them at it, you can always feel that piercing gaze, and almost hear that mocking voice:
“I just really feel like it’s a more user-friendly experience.” They must think to themselves. “I really prefer the editing features- it’s just necessary because I do a lot of amateur photography and graphic design work; my Mac just really reflects my lifestyle.”
I’d made all the excuses- “it’s the same to me,” “it has such a bigger screen,” “I actually PCs better,” but ultimately to no avail- I’d condemned myself to tote about an ongoing token of my lack of computing finesse, and no excuse could redeem me, because it is, ultimately, agreed that Macs probably do work better, crash less, operate faster and are more user-friendly, and so on and so forth. Thus, I had no option but to accept begrudging defeat at the hands of my self-righteous peers- that is, of course, until that blessed package arrived at my door last month.
Suddenly I was awash in all the features, all the bells and whistles of a brand new and irrefutably beautiful navy-blue and shiny chrome laptop- but best of all, it simply worked faster and better than any other computer. Having come equipped with the excessively hyped Windows 7, I was dubious about whether it would be better than my old laptop, which had come with the similarly advertised (and, as it turned out, detestably bad Windows Vista just one year before; but once I began to use it, I was hooked.
Everything you saw in those obnoxious round the clock commercials is true- you can do the sync the computers together thing, you can do the pop your windows into equal halves of the screen thing, you can do just about anything, it seems; I’m a PC and it sure feels like Windows 7 was my idea.
You can click, you can drag, you can zoom, you can turn, and you can literally plug and play because the moment you open your laptop, the welcome screen is immediately there to greet you. This is not the snail-paced junk that’s always inspired you to buy a new computer just so you could ravage your current one with a baseball bat a la Office Space, but rather a smooth, sleek, sexy beast of a computer. But best of all, of all its tools and tricks, Windows 7 has just about everything that a Mac does, with a few extras of its own (and all for about $780 less, of course). So now, finally, I can trawl the coffee shops around Capitol Hill with pride, or confidently type away on campus without feeling the disdain of a depressingly large subculture of technological self-righteousness.
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