Five minutes from arriving at my departure airport, I realized I left my work laptop at home. The only way I can feasibly travel like I do is to take it with me and work on my trips. That’s also the only way I could afford it! Once the “Fuck!”s stopped, I just decided to figure something out when I landed in Florida.
The problem was that I was getting on a cruise ship the next morning and was only going to be at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, not a hotel, for the night before. A person without a wheelchair would probably just hop in any old taxi and go to Best Buy but the accessible taxi options were slim-to-none. I also didn’t want to spend $100 on a taxi fare.
Essentially, my options were:
- Don’t do anything and just work on my phone. (This idea makes me cringe since I am a programmer.)
- Use the onboard computers in the ship cafe. (Probably limited ability to do the things I would need to do, e.g. connect remotely to my computer at home.
- Buy a computer in a port. (We weren’t stopping anywhere for two days and the first two ports were barren.)
- Buy something in the airport tech store. (There wasn’t one in my terminal and those places are expensive!)
- Call my cousin’s new wife and get one of her family members in Miami to bring me one to use for the trip. (I just can’t bring myself to be THAT guy tho.)
- Stop working completely, stay in Aruba, and change my career to shell-necklace-maker.
The last option I had was to see if Amazon would deliver me a laptop at the airport before my flight.
So I fired up the Prime Now app, changed my location to Fort Lauderdale, and bingo — a small selection of computers I could have delivered during a two-hour window the next morning.
Unfortunately, the only options were cheap ChromeBooks which wouldn’t allow me to install the software I use and a MacBook Air, which is not my preferred platform — but it was on sale.
Once I figured out the address of Terminal 2 at FLL and gave very specific instructions to the driver — “Meet me under the Air Canada sign at the end of Terminal 2 and look for me in my wheelchair” — I crossed my fingers and clicked Confirm Order.
I was a little concerned they would cancel the order because I was nowhere near home and the purchase was both expensive and RANDOM AS FUCK. This happened to me in France once and I had to call to tell them it really was me. But the order kept processing and the next morning at 7:30AM, the driver was there in front of the Air Canada door with my new laptop.
The best part is that although I didn’t want to spend that much on a computer, I won the money back in the casino on the ship the first night!
You Should Go Anyway 