Victor Kotchev ∙ 04/03/2020 ∙ March 2020
There's a lot of confusion out there surrounding the productivity of the company ThinkPad.
“It just doesn’t work properly,” said some student, somewhere, probably. “It’s just not close to as cool—or useful—as my Google Glass,” said one unfortunate soul with too much time on their hands.
A few students tested the quality of a ThinkPad by comparing the time it takes to turn on the computer to the time it takes for the elevators to get fixed. We were shocked to see that the ThinkPad beat the timing of fixing our school elevators by a whole minute. So, we, The Radish, have decided to turn to the internet, otherwise known as the best place to see whose opinion matches yours on important topics like which brand of computer should be considered a historical artifact.
The ThinkPad is “the most horrible excuse for a computer you can find on the first world market. It comes complete with reliable blue-screening and it’s got structural integrity comparable to a multi-story cardboard tower. Mine bluescreened when I powered it up, because the infernal blast seared my hands and I dropped it in agony. The laptop dropped four feet and three inches, and the hard drive shattered instantly,” Major Shmoopy described in a riveting interview from 2001.
“It’s not all bad, though,” Major Shmoopy continued, “if you lay down with the ThinkPad on you, you will become immune to fire. Also, think you can listen to music? Think again, buddy. The ThinkPad’s sound system has such difficulty buffering that your Nickelback (or whatever it is that those kids listen to these days) will freeze before becoming so choppy you can't understand a darned thing! It ain’t no computer, it’s a glorified brick.” Apparently, he once gave up and decided to read his assigned book club book after waiting an hour to search up the Flashnotes on a ThinkPad.
Beginning to understand that trying to use a “ThickPad” is as productive as attempting to motivate a Tech student who failed to get into Stuy twice, many people have begun looking for better ways to use their ThinkPad computers. One such solution tested using a ThinkPad as a toaster oven. “The bread was burned and the cheese was on fire,” Gordon Ramsay said after trying to make grilled cheese on a recently-activated computer.
Another idea was to use the laptop to heat homes unable to afford proper heaters. “The second we turned on the computer, it set fire to the walls and its battery ran out,” my mother complained, packing her bags for our new apartment in Harlem.
Maybe ThinkPad isn’t meant to be used for its original purpose. Maybe ThinkPads were an April Fool’s joke taken seriously. Well, at least someday in the far, distant future, when we won't have to use ThinkPads anymore, whenever we look at our burned, red, and crusty hands, we will remember these times we had writing essays slower on a computer than engraving the essay into stone.