Surprise MacBook!

This is a pretty big May for Mrs. Doogs, what with Lola coming (any time now…really) and all, so in addition to a spa day and a few other things she wanted, I decided to go big and get her an iPad for Mother’s Day. Her 12″ Powerbook G4 has been pretty useless for a few years now, and I figured the iPad would let her play on the internet and whatnot without having to lug our big MacBook Pro around (and leave it sitting in the bedroom while the battery drains down to nothing…).

Unfortunately, trying to buy an iPad a few days before Mother’s Day proved a giant exercise in futility. The best I could do was tell her my intentions, and reserve one at the Apple Store.

Over the course of our conversations, I came to realize that what Mrs. Doogs really wanted wasn’t an iPad, but a computer of her own. Sharing a computer doesn’t seem so bad when you’re the primary user, but once I was made aware of it, I certainly understood her resentment at being a second-class user, at the whim of my iTunes library, my photo library, my settings, organization and the like.

Once I grasped where she was coming from, I forgot about the iPad and became determined to get her a computer of her own instead.

Just one catch. Macs are quite a bit pricier than iPads. Fortunately, my parents offered to go in half-and-half, so today I headed over to the Apple Store and bought Jamie a 13″ MacBook Pro.

Once I got the MacBook Pro home and secreted it into the office, the question became one of how to best surprise Mrs. Doogs with her shiny new computer.

I decided to play a little switcheroo, and so while she and Nolan were napping, I unpacked her computer and ran through the basic setup process so she’d be ready to use it right away.

I also hid it in the keyboard tray, in case she decided to drop in.

To maximize the surprise, I moved our new 15″ MacBook Pro into the office…

…and replaced it with her 13″. While a discerning eye could probably tell them apart, they look pretty much identical, and I was betting she wouldn’t notice the difference.

At least not until she opened the computer and saw the custom background I created, which reads:

Dearest Jamie,

Roses are red.

Violets are blue.

By now you may be grasping that this MacBook Pro is for you!

Cheesy, I know. But I was also working surreptitiously and against the clock. Sue me.

So how did it all end up?

Well…the switch worked well. Perhaps a little too well. After reading the background, the wife turned to me and said “no it’s not”. At which point I had to explain that this was a different MacBook Pro. A new MacBook Pro.

But hey, this is the woman who didn’t notice when we replaced our old CRT TV with an HDTV…

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