The One Rule I Keep Breaking

Rule number one of owning an expensive laptop: don’t leave it sitting open and unattended in a café. This is not complicated. This is not advanced knowledge. And yet.

I do it constantly. At Sankt Oberholz, at Mein Haus am See, in whatever organic café in Neukölln I’ve parked myself in for the afternoon—I get up to use the bathroom and do I take the laptop? I do not. Every single time I convince myself that someone will watch it, or that nothing will happen, or that I’ll only be a minute. The logic doesn’t hold up under any scrutiny but I do it anyway, every time, as though the previous forty times somehow count as evidence in my favor.

A software developer named Ahryun made the same call in San Francisco and got burned. Someone walked off with her MacBook Air, then sat down somewhere else and used it openly, got photographed doing so, and the whole thing ended up on Reddit. The video circulated. People watched it. I watched it. And then, I am almost certain, I went back to leaving my laptop on café tables whenever nature called.

There’s no lesson here, which is the point. I know the rule. I know exactly what can happen. I just keep deciding, in the moment, that I’d rather risk the machine than look paranoid carrying it to the toilet. Which says something about me—about what I’m willing to lose versus what I’m willing to look like—and I’m genuinely not sure what.