VANCOUVER — The woman at the repair shop has never seen anything quite like this. She tells me this just moments after I pull my MacBook out of my bag. From the outside it looks okay; nine years of daily use have given its aluminum shell a space-age patina: a small dent, a couple scratches.
Of course, none of that is why I’m here.
She flips the laptop over.
“How did you get banana into the motherboard?” she asks.
Beneath the sterile light, I can see some residue splotches that I missed with the wet paper towel.
I tell her just enough to satisfy her curiosity; that yesterday a banana exploded in my bag. That it “got everywhere.”
I omit how the bag containing my laptop and the banana in question slipped off my shoulder as I reached to open the big glass doors leading into my office, how the sticky guts sat oxidizing in my bag for almost an hour before I caught a whiff and rushed to repair the damage, how even then I missed the splatter stuck to the undercarriage, which solidified into a sticky potassium jism.
It was only eight hours after the initial explosion that I even thought to test the computer. By then the body was cold.
This afternoon, I feigned ignorance when an Apple employee with his septum pierced told me there were food particles lodged in the motherboard.
“Because it’s from 2015, we don’t have the parts to repair it,” he explained.
He asked whether I had considered purchasing a new replacement. I had, in the sense that last night I researched the price of a comparable computer and saw that it would run me roughly $2300.
I told him I would think about it.
Outside the mall, I Googled computer repair shops. This was the first one that popped up; a little hole in the wall on Burrard Street, sandwiched between a dry cleaner and a vape shop. I’d walked by it a million times and never noticed.
She tells me it will take them three or four days to draw up a quote.
“We’ve never repaired something because of food damage,” she says.
I tell her four days for a quote is fine.
It’s raining as I exit the shop and onto the sidewalk. Pedestrians with black umbrellas cut silhouettes against the headlights in the dark. That weekend the shop will quote me $290 plus tax. A week later they’ll up the price to $350 saying the problem is worse than they imagined. But what can I do?
I’ve seen people pay more for miracles that promise a lot less.
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