Did I just do that?

I've talked about the propensity for people to be unbelievably cruel to hardware before, but a recent incident brought the issue to the fore, and reminded me of perhaps the second-most brutalised bit of IT on the planet -- the notebook.

(If anyone cares, I reckon most mice get, and stand up to, worse beatings than notebooks, but then again they're somewhat designed for that exact purpose.)

Over the New Year's period, I was setting up to have dinner with a close friend of mine, when he called to cancel. It turned out that while he was out to work, the inlet hose on his washing machine decided to split open. This sent countless litres of water splashing all over his apartment carpet, and his wife's notebook that was resting gently upon it. It was switched off, which undoubtedly saved the hard drive, but that's where the good news stopped with a halt, as did the possibility of this particular notebook ever functioning again.

Another friend of mine used to do notebook tech support for a major insurance company, and his horror stories relating to how sales reps treated their notebooks were always worth the price of a bottle of beer. Amongst the best were the ad sales rep who backed his car over his laptop, and the rep who threw his notebook into the back seat of his car, and, in the words of my friend, "missed". I wonder if that's similar to Douglas Adams' description of flight, where all you have to do is throw yourself at the ground and miss?

This also brings to mind a notebook incident that happened to a close relative of mine. Said relative was walking down a Sydney street with his notebook in his bag. As is the case with virtually any Sydney street, he walked past a building site, complete with uneven paving. One quick trip to the ground later, and his bag had gone on an impromptu flight with a concrete destination. This shattered the screen on his notebook into a crazier pattern than the ground upon which he had been walking.

Proving, however, that old adage about clouds with silver linings, he struggled on with the otherwise working notebook by plugging it into a monitor at his office. That worked well enough until his office had a visit from some shady fellows who decided to engage in a little light notebook pilfery. In an instant, he moved from a chap with an unsupported user problem (the broken screen) to a chap with an insurance claim for an entirely new notebook. I never did check with him if the insurance company pre-smashed the screen for him, but then again, he did kill a later notebook rather spectacularly with a glass of wine, so maybe it was a moot point.

I reckon there's probably a million different ways to off a notebook, and I'm sure that drowning, smashing and immersion in a fine Merlot are amongst the more tame versions.

Got any notebook suicides ("he jumped, honest officer!") you'd care to report to the squad here at ZDNet Reviews? Let me know your woes at edit@zdnet.com.au.

Alex Kidman is ZDNet Australia's Reviews Editor, and he hasn't killed a notebook, although he did once fry a ZIP drive with the incorrect voltage. Fun and fireworks were had by all.