I’m slowly personalizing my laptop, but I don’t know about a nickname

“Once you get to naming your laptop, you know that you’re really having a deep relationship with it.”
— Cory Doctorow

The Toronto-born author and blogger Cory Doctorow wrote these words in his novel Little Brother.

I know some people who have given personal names to inanimate objects, like a car. When I was little, we called my mother’s Datsun “Bridget,” in honour of her mom. I’m not really sure how that came to happen, but the name stuck for a good stretch of my childhood.

I have had or at least used, hmmm, a lot of computers over the years (my first was in 1985, when I bought the first-ever PC for the Canadian University Press office in Ottawa), including laptops, and especially Macs.

The one I am using to write this post is seen in the photo above. I still have two older Mac laptops, which I am finding hard to part with, even though I no longer have the means to get them running. See the photo below.

Yep, I took and placed the photo before writing this sentence. That’s pretty meta, no?

Anyhoo, despite my love for the machines (one of which dates back to the early Obama era), I’ve never given them a name.

I have though personalized the current one with some stickers. Since buying this one as I was retiring (my last couple were all company-owned, and I kept them sticker-free), I have been adding little bits of colour and personality.

For local content, there’s one of Cabot Tower (an icon on the horizon, and featured in the header image of this blog — and it happens to have a strong family connection, as my maternal grandfather, Bill Kelly, worked there for decades as a telegraph operator). There’s one called “sweater weather,” featuring a locally favoured design. From John Andrews and his Doodlepalooza store, I bought the Puffin Club sticker, which is a jest over the Jockey Club beer brand.

My favourite features a cat saying “I meowed what I meowed;” I bought it from a Ukrainian artist who was doing a pop-up at Johnny Ruth on Water Street in St. John’s. I regret I did not write down her name. There’s also, so far, a moose, a light bulb (creativity strikes are always welcome) and one from a recent reunion of the Muse, the student paper at Memorial University.

I have space to spare, and probably will tuck a few more stickers on it.

A name? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll wait for more of a personality to emerge.