Toshiba Satellite, Toshiba Satellite, Oh Toshiba Satellite!

You have betrayed me. You have proven yourself to be unreliable. My trust in you no longer exists. You have absconded with a portion of my meager wealth. You have forced me to undertake tedious journeys under adverse conditions. You have mocked my decision to purchase you in America. I can no longer sing praises of your glory for your glory has vanished from my world. I look at you with contempt.

What came upon you when you decided not to power up only 12 days after your one-year warranty expired? I treated you like a brother (my real-life brothers might think that that might be a problem) affording you with a place of prominence in my castle (you know the saying – “my home is my castle”). I protected you from electrical surges. Neither food nor drink could approach you. You never lost a challenge to gravity. You were my most prized possession, more so than my wife and sons (who probably don’t consider themselves possessions anyway).

Your Maker - the Toshiba Corporation- refused me the opportunity to bring you back to life under their Goodwill Program that would have enabled you to have been repaired at no cost, reasoning it was so close to the expiration of the one-year American warranty. I came to learn that laptops purchased in Europe have a two- year warranty and three years if purchased in Japan (or is it Germany?). You have rubbed salt in my wound and mocked my fellow consumers in the “home of the free and land of the brave” (or is it “the home of the brave and the land of the free?”). Why only one-half of a European warranty for Americans?

Your doctor gave me a choice to get you back to where you once were. I could pay 300 Euros for a new motherboard or 140 Euros to get the burned out components replaced (how did you manage to “burn out?”). I chose the latter since that was only ½ of my monthly subsistence allowance and I would be able to eat at least every other day. A somewhat easy decision.

You forced me to undertake a six-hour perilous round trip on a bus with neither air-conditioning nor operational windows in 90 degree heat to the only repair facility in the entire country. Three times! You subjected me to waiting hours in a darkened bus station for the next bus departure to my hometown in Probistip. Three times!

So now that you have robbed me of both my treasure and my trust, and have stolen three days of my life, I find myself sitting once again before you, composing this dispatch. I do this not knowing when you will choose to betray me again.

Maybe someday I will no longer point to the heavens – as does an enthused baseball player after hitting a home run– when you respond to my request to power up. Maybe someday! Till then: Toshiba – Caveat Emptor!

(N.B. Knowing that I would be in Macedonia for 27 months, I purchased a Toshiba Satellite laptop computer, considerably more expensive than other comparable laptops, relying on what I was told regarding its reliability. My experience has proven to me that “It” is not reliable (13 months before a major problem). I also raise the question as to why the Toshiba Corporation has different warranty standards. Are they enabled by weak consumer protection laws in the USA to offer a minimal one-year warranty. Based on my experiences and if I were to be so asked, I would not recommend this brand of laptop to anyone considering purchasing a Toshiba brand laptop in the USA.)