Seasick Laptops

No sooner had we gotten through with my grandma's funeral than I had to take off the next morning to attend a job related conference I registered for some time back. Oh, what a waste of a conference! At least I got to catch up on my sleep in my hotel room.

I noticed at the conference a number of people who had their laptops with them, many of them Macs. To take notes at the conference, to check their email, whatever. And what floored me was the precarious way these people would set their laptop on their lap. Precarious. I mean, as they typed on the keyboard, the laptop would be wiggling and wobbling and tipping and jiggling and all but flipping back and forth, every which way. It made me almost seasick to look at it.

It also made me wonder, weren't they at all nervous about read/write heads caroming off the surface of their hard drive as their laptop wildly wobbled and jiggled and flip-flopped this way and that? Or am I technologically out of date? I have an upper end laptop myself -- no, not a Mac, and I didn't bring it along with me to the conference -- and I habitually set it on my lap so that it is steady, stable, immobile as I type. Out of fear of what G forces might do to a spinning hard drive in motion, I won't even lift that laptop off my lap and set it somewhere without suspending it first.

And in all the years I've owned various laptops, I've never had any hard drive problems, never had a hard drive fail on me, never had any ominous read/write errors. I wonder if the owners of these wiggling flopping gyrating seasick laptops can say the same.