For those freshman who were too busy BROC-ing out to celebrate diversity, the following is an excerpt from NSO’s FACES Program.
When I first came to Stanford, I could tell I was different. Everyone around me had their sleek, off-chrome laptops, uniformly covered in stickers to express their individuality. And in my backpack, I had a large, brick-like behemoth of a computer.
But it wasn’t just the external differences that set us apart. We were different on the inside too. You soon realize that if you don’t already have UNIX underpinnings, you’re never going to get them. While everyone else passed each other files and programs, I had to download them from a server. When everyone else had Garageband, I had to use Windows Media Player. At the end of the day, they were Mac people, and I just wasn’t.
At first I just thought it was unfair. I didn’t choose to buy a Lenovo. My parents gave it to me this way as a graduation present. We had been a PC family for as long as I could remember, and no one judged us for it back home in Seattle, where you could go days without seeing a Mac person.
Then I started to hate myself for it. My classmates were right: my computer was ugly and not user-friendly. I stopped backing up my hard-drive, I started downloading from sketchier and sketchier websites. I was out of control. And then I realized something. I was not a Mac person. Nothing could change that. But I had a voice, a voice that traced its legacy all the way back to Microsoft SAM. I am a PC person, and no one can take that from me.
Though actually, if someone steals my laptop I can probably convince my parents to get me a Macbook Pro, so if someone takes it from me, I really wouldn’t even be that mad.
