Some people stress eat potato chips or Cheetos, others laptops. For Andrea Desoto, the latter was her item of choice for consumption during moments of high-intensity pressure. Maybe it had to do with the fact that laptops were here bane, the source of where all work of the inane variety hailed from.
She ate her first laptop at age twenty-five. It proved difficult at first, but ultimately rather satisfying. She washed it down with 3.99 white wine from Trader Joe’s. Something called Wolf Moon, or some such bullshit. She told herself that the first time would be the last time, but soon it became a habit. After her company replaced the one she ate with the assumption that it had been stolen from her desk, she had to turn to other sources for laptops. She started sleeping with an Apple Store employee in order to get him to give her generous discounts on the required merchandise for her diet.
When the Apple Store worker, whose name she has since forgotten, asked Andrea, “What do you do with all these laptops?”
Andrea replied honestly, “I eat them.”
That’s when he stopped seeing her. Andrea had to find a new supplier if she was going to be able to function properly at work. One day, after shitting out several mechanical parts in Central Park, Andrea came across a sign that read, “Donate Used Laptops to the Society to Give Impoverished Upper East Side Kids Laptops.” It was then she knew where her next fix would be coming from.
That Saturday, she went to the donation center pretending that she was going to give her current laptop up to the cause. After an uppity volunteer took her donation with the appraisal, “It’s a little dirty, but I guess we can still use it,” Andrea managed to sneak into the back room where they were storing all the goods.
It was a vision, an ultimate fantasy: surrounded by an endless pile of laptops to devour, to push down every feeling, every unwanted work assignment with the mere bite of a motherboard. How silly it was that people preferred “tablets,” when the real meat was on laptops.
Ten minutes of being in the room found Andrea with a metallic perimeter around her mouth and four broken teeth. But she kept going. She didn’t stop when she began throwing up RAM, sound board or screen hinge. She kept going, crazed by the availability of it all. Until the uppity volunteer came in, gasped, called the police and delivered the story to the NY Post, which titled the headline “Lap(top) Dance!” Andrea was forever known as The Laptop Eater at all subsequent office jobs. But no one fucked with her after that, and she was given a steady stream of laptops to go with her salary.