In a snit.

There continues to be violence in the Middle East. The skies are becoming ever more polluted. The ice caps are melting. Public grade-school education in this country is of horribly uneven quality and declining in many places. Thousands of people across this county are going to bed hungry and barely able to pay the rent. Traffic is a mess around here. We barely have a public transportation system. Spyware, viruses, and phishing are rampant, as is identity theft.

I say this because I know there are many important things to be concerned about, and the very reason I'm in a snit is going to come off as incredibly petty and insignificant.

My laptop died yesterday. More accurately, it stopped displaying anything. The disk drive is fine. Therefore the solution was to swap the disk into a new chassis. (It's not a personal machine.)

Trouble is, the new chassis is only new to me. It's in worse condition than the one I turned in (ignorning the display problem). Here is what is what I have discovered so far:

• The previous owner is bald and had a love for flaky pastries. I have come to this conclusion based on the large number of hairs and sticky crumbs I have found lodged in the keyboard. (The alternative is he/she is bald and has an advanced case of dandruff. Yeah. Humor me.)
• The previous owner has sweaty hands. I spent way too much time with a disinfecting wipe trying to clean out the worn spots on the keyboard.
• The previous owner is a meeting warrior. The battery was in terrible shape for the number of cycles on it. My old battery (which got transplanted into the new unit) has quite a few cycles too, but is still in good health.
• The unit has been dropped several times. Far more times and far harder than I ever dropped mine. This is because the plastic around the external monitor port is chipped away.
• The alt key is coming off. Of course, attempting to vacuum out the crumbs (humor me) and hairs didn't help at all, but the other keys stayed in place, so the alt key was loose to begin with.
• The fan is running hot.
• The unit appears to be having trouble shutting down properly. Of course, I don't have the patience to resolve this in one day. Only time will tell.

Only after this unit breaks down entirely can I go back and request a new one.