I sit on my bed, feverishly typing away on my laptop. Suddenly a little hand pops up from behind the screen and…plop…drops a little button down onto the slender space that lives just above the keyboard.

‘No No Baby. We don’t drop anything down onto Mama’s computer ok? It’s very…’ he slams the laptop shut…’delicate,’ I finish.

The button is still in there.

I inhale a stream of air through clenched teeth as if I’m about to examine a fresh wound. I slowly pry open the laptop to find the button and a black hole at the bottom of my computer screen to mark where the two first met. Radiating out of the black button hole are sunbeams heading north to the top of the screen and east to the right edge. The only useable space left on the screen now is a rectangle the size of an old paperback novel.

At Tekserve, I breathe in the same fashion as they explain to me the price to fix the screen is more than the cost of the computer itself.