As I write this, I’m into hour 15 of being without my beloved 17″ Macbook Pro. Her logic board failed yesterday, and I had to take her to the Genius Bar where I was told that while I had taken very good care of her over the last four years (and seriously, the Genius did say this several times), she would now be taken away from me for 5-7 days.

Gulp.

Let me set this up: I’m in the middle of writing my dissertation. I’m teaching one f2f course and 3 online courses. I’m doing a video research assistantship. I need Photoshop for my photography – the thing I do to relieve my stress from the previously mentioned work.

Five to seven days seems like an eternity.

But, those of you who know me, may say, “Dawn, you have an iPad and a Transformer Prime, both with keyboards. Won’t those suffice for 5-7 days?”

That’s the million dollar question. What I am noticing is that I turn to the Android tablet more because the websites I need to access are rendered better on the Chrome browser (as well as the native browser, and my newly added OverSkreen (which is a cool browser that gives that “window” effect by allowing it to overlay an app that is already in play).

What I’m also noticing is that I can’t be bothered with most social media because mobile apps just don’t give me the experience that my desktop apps do (and because of the lack of multitasking abilities (aside from the aforementioned OverSkreen) on the tablets, it is unwieldy to move back and forth quickly with copy and paste, deleting, unsubscribing, etc. These functions have come a long way from where they began, but holy cow these things are still very immature.

It’s forcing me to slow down, which drives me a bit crazy. I want to move quickly between browser tabs, classes, writing, data, etc. And don’t even get me started on data. My data is all in .jpg format (visual rhetoric IS fun, really!) and to look at it while writing about it is impossible, unless I print it all out (which would be 240 pages of printing (in color)).

Whine. Whine. Whine. First world problems. Yada-yada-yada.

I know this isn’t a big deal in the overall scheme of things, and I will manage over the next week. But what it has made me realize is how much I take for granted in the availability of my laptop. I love my tablets, and I find them to be excellent for short-term work management. But I haven’t found that I’m able to do everything I need to do, yet, with these magical little electronics — as much as I’d like to.