My new 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System

Also known as a “suitcase”

My laptop is big. It has a 17-inch screen, but it’s bigger than a lot of other laptops that have 17-inch screens. The screen makes for gorgeous movie viewing, and it allows me to keep a lot of open windows going all at the same time.

My laptop is heavy. It has more than 4 hours of battery life for word processing and wi-fi access (less for movie watching). The ability to run this big, gorgeous screen for 4 hours requires massive batteries.

When I bought this laptop, its mission was to sit on my desk during the weekdays and come along on occasional weekends.

Then the community college where I teach went paperless. Now, all of my course paperwork, grade sheets, communications from on high, and homework submitted by students who miss class resides not in a dead-trees file folder, but on my laptop. That means that I now have to lug this behemoth around with me, gorgeous screen, massive batteries, and all.

I had a nice case for it. But that case had two problems: It had room only for the laptop and not for the other books, papers, and stuff that I have to carry around – which meant that I had to have another bag for all of that. And it hung from a shoulder – first the right, and then when that got too sore, the left. By last week, I was in agonizing pain.

Yesterday, my birthday present from my folks finally arrived – a new case for hauling my laptop around. It has wheels. It has space for the laptop (a padded sleeve that’s just barely big enough) plus room for lots of other stuff. It’s made of polycarbonate. It’s fire-engine red.

It’s officially called the U.S. Traveler Manhattan 17” Lightweight Wheeled Executive Travel System. Whew. I try to teach my students to be more efficient and less verbose in their writing, and then I come face to face with an amazing example of diction inflation.

So today I loaded it up to roll off to teach my classes. I discovered that it’s not quite large enough, although it would have been had it not been for the H1N1 virus. Because of the flu, I’m supposed to carry a bottle of hand sanitizer and a box of tissues with me to all classes. I found a corner to fit the hand sanitizer in, but there wasn’t room for the box of tissues. I had to carry that separately.