Oh, Dear. What Have I Done?

I just got off the phone with Apple. I ordered a 13” MacBook Pro, my very first Foray into the Trial Process.
Oh, wait. That’s My Cousin Vinny. I meant, My Very First Foray into the Experience That is Apple. Or should I call that The Religion That is Apple?
I keep telling people that the iPhone is the gateway drug for Apple:  we PC users go along being perfectly happy—or, well, not perfectly happy. Not really even vaguely satisfied, actually, since almost every one of us hates Vista with a bloody passion, but anyway—we go along not thinking we’ll never want to make the switch and then, innocently enough, we buy an iPhone. We circle it warily for a while. Then we begin to download some apps. We start to dick around with it, learn some moves, feel a little slick and sassy. Next thing you know, we’re traveling to some city with an Apple Retail Location, pushing our way through the worshippers at the Genius Bar, going home to order various Portable Genius volumes.
Like, for instance, the one about Switching to a Mac. Mine has not actually arrived at my house yet, but it’s on its way.
Eventually I want to switch over to Mac completely. The people I know and with whom I work almost all swear by Macs—the people who spend much of their days tethered to their computers are often Mac users, and they sure seem a lot happier with their experience than do the people who are still gritting their teeth over the disaster that has been Vista.
But I need to start off slowly. I have to be able to work, with no learning curve, on the main computer. I don’t have a couple weeks to get up to speed. So I’m starting out with a notebook computer. I’ll learn the operating system, get familiar with the differences, gnash my teeth and grumble and moan in my off hours. Then, when I’m ready—and when I can afford it—I’ll make The Big Switch.
To force myself to make this switch, which I dread, in many ways, I forced myself into getting a new laptop by giving away my old one. It was only two years old (approx. the age of Methuselah in Computer Years, I know), but it was a fancy schmancy 17” HP with a webcam and tv interface and a whole bunch of stuff I’d never unwrapped. The stuff to make it work as a tv tuner had never even come out of the bubble wrap. It had been used so seldom, since it was big (17”!) and quirky (damn Vista) and scary (all so new and big and shiny and damn expensive (it was a birthday gift from The EGE two years ago)) that it still looked brand new.
So I gave it to our nephew. Let him unwrap the tv tuner stuff and have a go at it. Let him figure out how to access the webcam videos from YouTube (I took some videos and could watch them but could never access them from YouTube to upload them, which is so weird, since I’ve uploaded tons of videos from other places. I couldn’t figure it out to save my life, and that just made me pissy.) Sadly, we never bonded. I picked it out, I thought it was going to be perfect, I treated it like royalty. But it just never settled in, and we remained strangers.
Well, it’s done. They’re officially Building My Computer as I type this. Snort.
The lovely young woman tried to sell me the protection plan on the argument that I’d have phone support for several years. I laughed just like I did on Tuesday when Wendy told me the same thing. She said that even she, who has used a Mac since the 1980’s, has, on rare occasion, found it helpful.
I asked her, “Why in the world would I pay $200 so I could call someone for phone support when I have YOU on speed dial?” My theory is, If Wendy Doesn’t Know It, It’s Not Worth Knowing.
If there’s anything that one of the Women Who Say Fuck doesn’t know? You don’t need to know it.
Nevertheless, I’m going to apologize to you in advance for all the grousing and bitching you’re sure to hear from me as I learn yet another bit of new-to-me technology. I like to think of it as my way of preventing Alzheimer’s.
Right.