First full day without a Mac

Yesterday was a weird day. Not only was it my last day on the job, after three and a half years, but at the end of the day I turned in two pieces of electronics that probably mean way more to me than they should. My MacBook Pro and my iPhone. Back when my family was still stuck in a Sprint contract, I arranged to get one of the company iPhones. Then we got iPhones for the rest of the family last Christmas, but I just kept the company phone. I kind of felt like I should get my own phone and turn that one in, so I would have one when I left the job, but procrastination is an interesting thing.

So earlier in the week, it was my plan to just go to AT&T's website and add a line to our family plan, and order myself a phone. But I couldn't decide which phone I should get. A refurbished 3GS (cheap), a new 3GS (still pretty cheap), or an iPhone 4. Then I started researching the rumored release of the iPhone 5 and found that the consensus seems to be that it will come out in the next month or so. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that I should wait. So I decided to get a Straight Talk phone from Walmart, to tide me over until the new phone comes out.

Even though it seems like the right thing to do, living without an iPhone for a month (or six weeks, or whatever) seems like more of a sacrifice than it really is. But when you couple that with the loss of the Mac at the same time, it's really intimidating.

Suffice to say that, after I turned these things in yesterday, I was kind of lost. I activated my Straight Talk phone (a good deal, but sheesh -- what a miserable phone). Of course, I didn't have any numbers on it, and I don't know the numbers of my family members. I have them in my Google voice phone book, but I didn't have a computer! Lesson learned: I should have brought my laptop from home to use as soon as I didn't have my work laptop. I'm just not used to not having a work laptop, so I didn't think of what it would really be like while I was still at the office.

So speaking of my home laptop: it's not a Mac. I'll list the inventory of the computers I have at home:

• My first Mac, a PowerMac G4 from about 2002. It's in pieces, and it's been out of commission for a long time, but it was my first Mac and it's still technically at my house.
• Our second Mac was a 20-inch, Intel iMac. We still have it, and it dual boots, between Mac and Windows XP. I have not used it myself in a long time. My son reports that it has not been working right lately. Apparently it just shuts off when it heats up to a certain point. Who knows what that could be.
• A couple of years ago, I got a used PowerBook for my wife. It was pretty good at the time, and for what she needed, but as time went by, we realized more and more that it was not much of a workhorse. It went through one crisis when it fell off the coffee table. I got it fixed at MacAuthority. Now it seems to have an issue with the battery that prevents it from booting at all, even when plugged in. It's probably not a terribly difficult thing to fix, but I also know this particular computer is not impressive enough to even bother with fixing it. I have been in favor of replacing it with an iPad, so handle family sofa browsing needs, which is all that computer was ever used for.
• Most recently, we added a PC to the lineup. I'm almost always too cheap to buy new computers, and this was no exception. Woot was offering refurbished ThinkPads a while back, and I read up on that model (T60) and decided to take the plunge. It was only $219. Pretty hard to pass up if it's decent. It turns out that it is actually decent, and I'm using it right now.

So that's the landscape: For the next week, before I start my job, I do not have a Mac (except for the iMac, that I might try to mess with and see what's going on with it) and I do not have an iPhone. I have a crappy Straight Talk phone and a ThinkPad T60. It has a 4-by-3 screen and a maximum resolution of 1024x768. It has a terrible battery that lasts about 15 minutes, but it works fine when it's plugged in.

Today is my first full day without a Mac. The journey begins. Even when I start my new job, it will be with a PC, but I assume it will be a pretty nice PC. But for now I'm stuck with the ThinkPad. I was pretty depressed about it last night, but then I decided to take control of the situation. My next post will be about the positive development that made me realize this next week will be okay.