Leave…it…alone.

Yesterday morning, I walked into the living room and pulled my netbook out of its case. The manual flopped out onto the floor, which was weird, because I hadn't put it in there. No thinking anything of it, I put it on the desk.

Later that day, Sunny is walking through the house, spots the manual, does a 'wife-sigh' and starts unzipping the netbook case.

"What're you doing?" I asked.

"Putting the manual with your netbook."

"Well don't." I said. (The 'case' is just one of those small, zip up sleeves, I didn't want anything else packed in there). "In fact, you can bin the manual if you don't want it lying around."

"No." She said, in a wifely way. (married men will know what that 'wifely way' is. "You should keep it with the netbook."

"Why?" I asked. "I don't need it any more."

"Well I might!" She said.

I paused and blinked. It honestly didn't compute for a second. Eventually, I had to ask

"Ummm, why would you need to know how to use my computer?"

"I dunno." She said. "Maybe you'll be out and I'll just wanna…"

"No, you don't understand." I said. "The netbook is my computer. You have your own laptop."

"…and?" She said.

"It's mine. I don't want you using it. I was the whole point of getting it. You have your laptop, I have mine."

"Oh?" Said Sunny, suddenly looking like she'd caught me out. "What have you got to hide that you don't want me using your computer?"

 

Ok, it's time to clear this up.

If you're the 'computer guy' in your family and share a communal computer, you know exactly what a pain in the ass it is. When I was living in England, thanks to my brother's porn-surfing habits, my desktop was so full or viruses, I think it actually managed to contract syphilis. I had to do a complete wipe and reinstall about every week and a half.

Before we got Sunny her laptop, I lost count of the number of times I'd turn on the computer and the wallpaper would be different, the desktop would be rearranged, my bookmarks would have been 'organized' or I'd turn on the computer and find she'd signed up for something using our main outlook email address which opened the floodgates to spam.

Plus, there is nothing, nothing more annoying that turning on the computer to check something online only to discover nothing will work and hear "Oh yeah, I meant to tell you about that. I was downloading this thing…"

As I've mentioned before, Sunny even told me once: "Oh yeah, it wasn't working this morning either, just turn it off. It tends to start working again after a few hours."…not understanding that it 'tends to start working again' because I try to use the computer, discover something is wrong and fix it.

In other words, I like to have my own computer that nobody else uses because I like to have my own computer exactly the way I want it, and know I'm never going to turn it on to check my email and instead spend the next three hours fixing something that someone else broke.

Now, don't get me wrong. If something happened to Sunny's laptop that I couldn't fix, she's more than welcome to use mine…but while she has her own laptop that I deliberately never touch (unless I'm fixing something), I just don't see any reason for her to use mine.

That, and I don't want her finding my three terabytes of Chinese dwarf amputee porn bloopers I have on there.