Damian Robb

Hello from Brunswick Manor, by which I mean the three bedroom I live in located in inner city Melbourne. It’s hot and muggy here and we’re on the cusp of a stormfront that has been making it’s way toward the city all day. I’m hoping it’ll break soon just so we can get some relief, it’s feeling too amazonian for my tastes at the moment.

If I seem somewhat melancholy today that’s because I am. Something happened last weekend that crushed me. I lost a good friend and constant ally, someone who had been by my side or on my lap for the past five years.

My macbook pro.

It was by no means the perfect bit of machinery. It roared softly like an angry cat whenever it got overheated, the screen never seemed completely free of dust no matter how many times I cleaned it, and one of its speakers no longer worked. But it was special, and it was mine.

Together we wrote stories, drew comics, created websites (such as this one), listened to music, and watched movies. It helped me download tabs so I could play songs on my guitar, find recipes so I could cook new and delicious meals. With it I completed a masters, bought plane tickets and accommodation to travel the globe, and interacted with a digital world. It allowed me to contact the people I love when they were far away, write to them, talk to them, smile at them as they smiled back at me. It quite simply helped me organise my life, both work and play. It will be missed. It will also be replaced. I sure there’s a moral there if you’re in the mood for one.

However much I’m mourning my laptop I’m also that one that killed it. I was visiting my friend Gabe, at his beautiful new place in Kew, together with our friend Sean (who’s so nice I refer to  him as nice-guy-Sean), and the three of us were having a writing day. We all met while doing the screenwriting course and have been working on a web series for the past few months. Little did I know this would be the last writing project my poor macbook would work on.The day was going well; we had managed to whip our pilot episode script into shape with a collective pool of jokes and Gabe’s hard fingered typing, and weren’t too far from a well earned break. That’s when I made a decision that would end a life; I decided to charge my laptop. In order to reach the outlet I moved to the other side of the table, stretched my charger from my laptop to the wall, and plugged it in. In doing so I had trapped myself between my stretched out cable and Gabe’s chair. I tried to step over the cable. I failed. I accidentally pulled the cable, the laptop came with it, and it hit the floor hard. Being the nice guy that he is Sean asked “Is it alright?” It was not. My desktop picture of a panda climbing a tree showed up briefly in a sickening display of purple and greens before the screen switched to a hazy collection of greys. The irony that through the act of trying to extend my laptop’s life I instead killed it is not lost on me.

Luckily however through a HDMI cable, a connector, my TV, and an external hard drive I was able to transfer my life off of the hard drive. The repair costs however would be over a thousand dollars and for that price I can buy a new one, which I will, once the mourning process is over.

Bring on the storm, it suits my mood.

Talk soon

Damian