Close Zipper!

I bought a smart new MacBook Air M2 earlier this year: it’s a lovely machine, fast and sleek and better in almost all ways than the 11 year old MacBook Air it replaced (I get good mileage out of big expensive things).

One of the things the sexy new machine has prompted me to do is to work in places other than my church basement office: I’ve spent more time working from my dining room table, from the camper, from the library, from the coffee shop, in the last two months than ever before. 

To enable this new work mobility, I bought a PKG laptop case from Staples last month. It’s a great case: just the right size for the MacBook and it’s power brick and cable, with a comfortable carrying handle on the top.

The one downside is that the laptop enters the case through a zipper on the short edge.

This downside isn’t entirely a downside: keeping the insertion point away from the top handle area makes things much cleaner and less complicated.

But it’s a downside inasmuch as when I forget to zip the zipper closed, when I place the MacBook inside the case, there’s a 50% chance that sometime shortly thereafter, as I walk about town, the computer is going to come shooting out the end and land on the sidewalk.

It’s happened twice.

Fortunately the computer hasn’t been damaged, other than mild scratching, when this has happened.

But evasive action was needed.

For reasons I don’t completely understand, I have a difficult time “defacing” things I own: I never put stickers on laptops, bumper stickers on cars, etc. I want to change this, to become less precious in my relationship with stuff, and to unleash my inner customizer, but it’s a struggle.

In this case, though, I struggled and I won.

In the model of the Neistat brothers, who label and customize everything, I took a “whiteout pen” and wrote CLOSE ZIPPER! on both sides of the case, near the zipper:

Doing this goes against all my anti-defacement tendencies. But I also love it a lot. And I’m hopeful that it will help keep my MacBook Air from an early death.