D dropped his ailing laptop on Friday morning; it was already a fairly abused piece of electronics — life within D’s bookbag is not ideal if you’re a laptop.  But the 4 foot drop out of its not-zippered-shut-after-all case to the hardwood floor below was more than the poor device could handle. The little metal tinkling sound that comes when you shake this laptop now sounds something like a cross between a maraca and a broken filament in a lightbulb.

To make a long story short, even though D and I are both kind of handy with computers, we decided to buy a new one rather than try to resurrect the obviously damaged goods.

Off to Best Buy went we:  Long haired compu-geek hippies with our kids in tow: blond pig-tailed seven-year-old C (a computer game fiend if ever there was one) and her adorable side kick A, cheering her on. Waltzing into the display of laptops, we grownups began muttering about CPU’s, RAM, and all that kind of jazz.  Blithely ignoring all etiquette, I set up C with a game of Chuzzle, something she quickly mastered. That took care of occupying the one child, but no dice with keeping A happy. Since I didn’t much approve of her idea to lay down in the middle of the aisle, flailing her legs around and singing songs of her own tuneless composition, I picked her up and soon had her bouncing on my shoulders while we watched C play Chuzzle.

On my back, my trusty little bookbag, with its trusty little zippered compartments.  Only one problem. Apparently, the darn thing wasn’t actually zippered. Unbeknownst to me, while I bounced and wiggled my 4 year old (along with, no doubt, plenty of my own parts a-wiggling and bouncin’), flotsam and jetsam came spilling out of my bookbag, making a huge mess just behind me.  A very tentative nerdy PC sales guy came over and pointed out my situation.

I  looked down to see the mess I was making. Among the receipts, loose change, and occasional goldfish cracker were several tampons spread out in an array that spread a five foot radius around me. Oh dear. No wonder the guys were so hesitant to say anything. Clearly they were mortified; one the one hand they wanted to help clean up, but on the other hand… EW, man, those is GIRL things!

I wasn’t too embarrassed, though, and quickly thought of a way to defuse the situation.  I  set A down and asked her to help me clean up, taking care to snap up the personal stuff quickly.

The staff didn’t seem to mind us that much once we had selected a model and asked, got this one in stock? We even bought the 3 year Spills and Drops warranty and a new laptop bag (one that has closed sides!).