Having worked in television for a couple of years, and now working in a job which amounts to corporate communication (although generally of things the corporations don’t want communicated), I’ve half-convinced myself that I’m a woman upon whom marketing and advertising budgets are wasted; that I’m above the fray, that I know the score, that . . . you know, wanky wanky wank. But now I’ve bought my first Macintosh, and it’s not even here yet, and I’m already looking at websites about how great it is and how I can take care of it, like it’s a fucking puppy. So I’m not so sure. Rational(izing) Spliffe tells me I bought it because:
- The F-word and I both bought laptops in early 2003. His, a Macintosh, is still working perfectly, outside of a sticky disc drive. Mine, a Dell, is dead. DEAD. Really, really dead. His had the same problem that’s made mine dead, around the same time. And he fixed it himself. He’s an artist who can barely add. And professionals shrug their shoulders at my dead, dead Dell. Fine.
- I looked into a lot of other PC brands, and once I get the programmes I want with the features I want (even though I don’t think I want that much) it costs about the same as the MacBook I’ve bought, though that’s because I bought a refurbished one, and in Canadian dollars. My mum’s bringing it later this week.
Both good reasons, right? But Critical Spliffe says no, no, you bought it because it’s fucking pretty. With the aluminum and the glass and the brand notoriety and everything. You bought it because the aggressive, insipid, lifestyle/status marketing worked. You’re weak! Weak! You're like all those assholes who you deal with at work who talk about their boats and Audis! And maybe Critical Spliffe is right. I will try to use this experience as a lesson to be less judgemental about all the other stupid fucks who pay too much for lifestyle-branded goods. Or possibly to be more judgemental about myself. A bit of both, perhaps.
In any case, Critical Spliffe is excited about the new Mac too. It gets her goat that the F-word is still pottering along happily with his computer and ours is dead in the corner; she’d never give me any peace if I bought another PC and it crapped out prematurely too. And yes, 6 years is fucking premature. I paid something like Euro 1500 for that piece of shit in 2003 – I was stupid enough to buy it from the French retailer. That means it cost me, just for possession, 250 a year, which I could have spent on marijuana or trips to the west coast. Or, if I’m right about what my portfolio was making over those years, it would have got me about CAD800 in ill-gotten stock market returns. Not to mention how it did my fucking back in every time I budged the fat fucker off the desktop. I’m not saying it wasn’t worth it, just that – okay – maybe it wasn’t worth it. We'll see if the new one is.
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