unlimited nights and weekends of snobbery is mine for the taking.....

About a month ago our home computer started doing what a computer does when its warranty runs out - it started giving us strange error messages. Things like "insufficient memory", "not authorized for this task" and "Bill Gates for leader of the free world". I spent an evening backing up all of our files. Normal backups usually took me about 30 minutes. That night it took me almost 3 hours. That's when I started shopping for a new computer.

I can get really good corporate discounts through Dell so I started looking at their computers. I kept going back and forth between a desktop and a notebook. Then the bride suggested that I look at a Mac.

I don't have alot of experience with Macs. In fact, I've always sort of poked fun at Mac owners. A former boss of mine just had to have one for his office several years ago. It was never compatible with anything else in our office. We could usually get it to work with some of our other software, but it generally took alot of extra work. One morning I put a "Fisher Price" sticker on the front of his monitor. He didn't think it was funny.

I e-mailed a friend of mine who's been a Mac enthusiast for 20 years. I told him what we were thinking about buying along with the software we'd need. At the end of the e-mail, I said that I imagined him reading it and saying to himself that I'd "finally seen the light". I called him to talk about it the next day and I asked him if that was what he was thinking as he read the e-mail. He said, "No, what I was really wondering was are you worthy?"

He was joking, of course, but that's pretty much the attitude of diehard Mac fans. And this was proven when I visited a local authorized Mac dealer a day or two later. When I asked questions, they looked at me as if I'd just broken wind and asked to have the offense gift wrapped. It was like I was bothering them, taking up their time. By then I was sold on a Mac, but I sure as the world wasn't going to buy it from them. I ended up ordering over the phone from Apple. I talked to a guy named Braden who peppered the phone call with plenty of "dude"s, "awesome"s and "ah, no worries"s.

We got the iMac Saturday. Setup was the simplest I've ever experienced. The hardest part of the whole thing was removing our old computer and untangling all its wires. The iMac has one power cord and built-in wireless internet. And compatibility with most programs is no longer an issue. Office:Mac is completely compatible with MS Office.

So now I have the opportunity to look down on non-Mac owners. The problem is that the girls like the Mac so much that I may never get to use it.....