Laptop burns

Ever heard of it? I hadn’t… I found out the hard way. Its not very nice.
For starters, I have never liked laptops. There’s this feeling of fragility when I use them and it reflects in whatever activity I am using a computer for at the time. Give me a sturdy solid finality of a desktop any day. I don’t like TFTs either. The colors are all funny and change with my angle. The keyboard also doesn’t feel right. I can’t type fast enough on it and the keys don’t depress far enough to type comfortably. I am from the typewriter days, an ancient mammoth trying to make some sense with all this not-always-for-the-better technology. People laugh at me when I tell them that my cell phone is more than two years old.
“How do you live without a 4 GB SD Card?” they ask me in disbelief.
Well, I get by. And I have no problems what so ever. I don’t really need 5,000 mp3s and 150 videos all the time. And nothing in my life warrants running around with a 6 mega-pixel single lumen camera with me all the time.
But I do have a laptop. I need it for the times when I have to give some kind of a presentation to stubborn clients who don’t want to read the same thing written down or when I need to do some work while I’m away from Bhopal.
So what is a laptop burn? Hmm, I had assumed, as the name suggests, that a laptop could be used in, well, my lap. So when I came home from work a few weeks back, I had a refreshing cold shower, got into my comfortable shorts and a t-shirt and sat down cross-legged on my bed with a fresh cup of steaming coffee Swati prepared for me. All well so far.
I booted up my laptop and got to work. The work wasn’t much, just some translation for a client that took less than fifteen minutes to complete. I suppose the coffee didn’t really work because I dozed off afterwards in the same position with the laptop still in my lap. I woke up about fifteen minutes later with a burning sensation in my leg. I looked down and there was a long burn-gash on my thigh. The laptop vents for its internal fan were just above where it rested against my leg.
Its hard to believe but the air coming out of the exhaust was hot enough to burn my skin. For more than a week after that, I had a itchy burning gash three inches long on the inside of my thigh. Since it was in a place with constant contact against my pants, the scabs kept rubbing off and giving me hell. It was even shaped like the vent with regularly spaced bands of burns and normal skin where the vent supports shielded me from the heat. Go figure.
That was the last time I used the laptop in my lap. I am typing this entry on the laptop but its lying on the dining table while I am sitting safely on a chair. So much for trying to use a laptop in my lap.