On I think at least 2 occasions, my wife has thrown out a debit card or credit card when it arrived in the mail. Steven Levy thinks somone–his wife, or maybe himself–threw out . . . his brand new Macbook Air:
So what happened? In lieu of the presence of a poltergeist with techno-lust, I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air. On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin. Sometimes the whole mess gets so nasty that I even perform this task myself. Could it be that somewhere in the stack was a Macintosh computer so thin that its manufacturer brags it could fit inside an envelope? I believe so. (For the record, my wife does not subscribe to this theory.)
As humiliating as it sounds, let me repeat: the MacBook Air is so thin that it got tossed out with the newspapers.
To forestall this in my own future, I’d better start keeping better track of my piles of stuff.