Hardware Malfunction
Bad news. I’ve only been in Kuwait for a few days and the laptop I borrowed from my mom to use on this Kuwait TDY has already gone kapult on me. I ran some diagnostic tests and from what I can gather, the hard drive died. Unfortunately, any kind of hard drive replacement would take 30 to 45 days to ship because I am in Kuwait and they need to go through military mail handling procedures.
I know that I will go stir-crazy if I don’t have access to the Internet or can’t use my computer to play videos/music while I am here. Think about it — work 10+ hour days for thirteen days straight (just one day off every pay period) and when I come back to my lodgings I can’t even unwind on my computer??!! No. No way. I need to have a computer. And besides, I already spent $35 to buy one month of Internet service.
Thus, I started looking online to see if I could buy a replacement computer. Unfortunately, even websites such as Dell, Walmart, etc… state that shipment to APO locations would also take up to 30 to 45 days. Hence, my last recourse was to buy a laptop here at one of our onsite APO stores (basically like a very tiny itty bitty Walmart). So I went and browsed through the selection of laptops they sell (very limited quantity). Fortunately, their prices are comparable to online prices and the big plus is no sales tax!
I chose one of the cheapest laptops they had (I stayed away from the netbooks cause a ten inch screen is too small for me to watch movies on for the next six months) and got a Toshiba Satellite Model#L505D-S5992 for $600. Sucks to spend $600 all at once but it is a necessary expense to keep myself sane here. I’ll try to limit my spending for the next four weeks in order to minimize the impact of my spending in this week.
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