Backstory since someone will inevitably ask, and if not, I’m going to tell it anyway because it’s Sunday and I have nothing better to do with this free laptop at the moment. Back in the early days of the pandemic chaos, I ordered and received nearly a dozen of these X390 Yogas from a company that may or may not rhyme with BlueLeg. A couple of them immediately showed near-DOA hardware issues that I’m not going to bother blaming on anyone in particular – so they had to be exchanged, but, as I already mentioned, this was early 2020. In the time that followed my return request, I fought repeatedly and fruitlessly to simply get an email with a shipping label so I could return them, a process that went on for weeks and weeks while the customer waited patiently for their systems that were destined for a critical role in an office that provides very important services to the public. Eventually I made enough noise to catch the attention of someone far enough up the food chain who was able to send me an email with a tracking number. Relieved to finally have what I expected to be an empty box with a prepaid return shipping label on the way to our office, I let my coworker know to watch out for UPS. When I noticed the tracking status said delivered, I got on the phone with him and was as amused as I was annoyed to find out that they had not, in fact, sent an empty box, but a full box containing a re-shipment of the entire order at no charge to us.

So… I simply omitted the error, let ScrewGreg know we had still not received our return shipping label (in another strongly-worded email), and then subsequently got one, surprisingly within 24 hours. Two went back as promised, just as broken as they were the day we received them, and the rest stayed in the box for months waiting on someone to come looking for them… except nobody ever did. Some allegedly ended up with my boss’s kids, others may or may not have been sold to other customers, but one remained in my office for over two years, forgotten at the bottom of a pile of old servers while I complained nonstop about the ancient Dell I had been using since about the Eisenhower administration. That is until earlier this year when I finally dragged my ass in from the home office to the office office for some spring cleaning and was about to throw away what seemed like a suspiciously heavy empty box… and, well, here is the result.

Apologies for the messy room, I’ve been too busy reformatting SSDs and installing various Linux distros like the nerd I am.