paying the price

I am paying the price for losing a laptop.

My laptop's screen is flickering, sometimes blanking out to a pure white background. It is frustrating when I am trying to finish up some work and I can't see a damn thing. Sometimes I make do with the flickering and the jumping up and down of the screen. It's like watching a TV screen trying to catch a channel signal. It is annoying and irritating as hell.

Patience is a virtue, they say. So I try to be patient. I try to remove and re-install the video driver everytime my laptop screen acts up, but this is more of a hardware error more than anything else.

Right now I am making do by attaching my laptop to a monitor. Ideally, they should give me a new laptop. This one is old, second-hand (or maybe even third-hand), and acts up a lot. But some clever thief got away with my laptop and I am paying the price. They may not have deducted it from my salary, but definitely it is taking its toll on my patience, my thoughts on how my employer perceives my value, and it is taking its toll on the quality of my work.

Then everybody loses.