James turned eleven today, but since his parents were not here to celebrate with him, it was meaningless. James decided to let this pass by, for the first time in his life. He took a cab to the electronics store to purchase a new laptop and other accessories.
He entered the store and saw many people already purchasing here. James did not waste time, he headed to the laptop section and carefully searched for the kind that was suitable for him. James wanted a very fast laptop with more storage capacity, something his previous laptop lack.
"HP, uh uh, DELL, maybe, uhh…. Chromebook, definitely not…. Asus. Oh, Asus" James mumbled as he checked the specs of each of the laptops on the counter. He noticed that some PCs have what others did not have. For example, HP was great in office work, so it was optimized for storage capacity and fast ram, but it lacked a good CPU, which made it a no-no for anyone that is buying their rig for gaming.
DELL, on the other hand, was more optimized for both gaming and personal use, which was a viable option for anyone that wants to consume content or solely use their laptop for light gaming, but the downfall was the battery.
James stared at the ASUS laptop, which was more than perfect for him. It was tuned perfectly for gaming and application development, while still managing to be power efficient. Their display also looked so crisp and well saturated. 'I'll take it.'
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"This is the ASUS laptop I'm purchasing, along with this monitor, two thunderbolt cords, three flash drives, microphone, headphone, and this Nvidia GPU, that's all," James said with a straight face.
The Asian woman over the counter stared at James again. "I'm sorry, but how old are you?" she asked. "Ten, no eleven. I'm eleven. Is that a problem?" James asked without any expression on his face. "No, not at all. I just wanted to know considering your—you know what never mind. Are you paying cash or card?"
"I'm paying with a card," James said and promptly brought out the credit card and handed it over to the woman. The woman placed the card in the POS and a few seconds later, she pulled it out and handed it to James. "Thank you for shopping with us. See you next time" the woman said, but James ignored her and took the bag they placed all his items to and left the counter. 'What a weird kid' the woman thought.
James did not go home directly. He went to a pet store and bought cat foods, spending more than $500 on the food because he did not know how much the cat was gonna eat anyway. After paying for the cat food, James packed it in another bag and walked out of the store.
James waved to a cab and headed back home. When he arrived, he dropped down and headed to the door, but it was locked. "Oh, come on, not again." James sighed and dropped the bag on the floor. He proceeded to the porch and called the cat out, but the cat was not coming outside.
"Hey, kitty," James called, but the cat just stared at James with a blank expression. James did not know what to do, so he uncanned one of the cat food and poured all its content on the plate he bought from the store.
The cat, on seeing the food, began to crawl slowly outside the hole. After approaching the plate, he stared at James, who displayed no expression, before she dug into the food and ate rapidly. 'This cat was probably very hungry. I'm glad I remembered to buy this amount of food' James was a bit glad he made the right decision.
After the cat was satisfied, she simply walked back to the hole and lay down, ignoring James completely. James soon packed up the plate and thoroughly cleaned the food spills before dumping them into the trash. He was about to sit at the entrance when he noticed a paper fall out of the gap of the door.
It was a note from Martha. "The key is on the foot mat on your left." James removed the mat, and there it was the key. He used it to open the door and entered. The family had gone out, leaving him alone in this house. James was satisfied at being alone, so he headed to his room and started arranging his new items.
He took out the laptop from its pack and brought it out. It looked so premium and cool. There was even an extra monitor below the main screen for editors to easily edit the timelines of a video, but James would use it for another purpose. He also unwrapped the sleek monitor and placed it on his bed.
James stared at his room. There has to be a space to put all these though. Martha removed the study table that he used to put on his laptop before. He went to the storage room just next to the kitchen and saw his desks and seat placed there. James took it out and carried it back to his room. He then put the desk close to his bed and put the monitor, the microphone and the headphone, and put them on the table.
After connecting them correctly, he powered on his new laptop. The laptop displayed the company's logo, before booting to Windows. This time, James did not want Windows to be his main operating system. 'I'm going to install my Kali Linux on this beast, but first, I'll restore all my files from the cloud' James thought as he unwrapped other items he bought.
After it booted completely, which took less than 10 seconds, he plugged the monitor into the outlet and turned it on. It was a DELL Alienware monitor, which was recommended by a gamer he met in the store.
"If I want to buy a superb monitor, I'll probably choose this baby. It supports HDR and its colour saturation is sooo good. Do you know that this thing is an OLED display? As you can see it…." the young boy kept rambling as James scrutinized other monitors displayed on the counters.
"How about this one?" James interrupted as he pointed to a curved display. "It's a DELL Alienware monitor, I've used one once. Though its latency is very low, its colour gamut is not too wide enough, but it's still a decent monitor anyway" the young boy explained.
This boy must be a gaming nerd. James thought as he looked at the monitor. Lower display latency, that's good enough for him, so he took it out of its counter and added it to his cart.
After powering it on, he took out the thunderbolt cord from the baggage and connected it to his PC and connected the other end to the monitor. His laptop screen blinked for a second, and the monitor then came to life, mirroring the current screen of his PC.
James quickly changed the projection to extend, then syncing all his data from his previous laptop to his current one. Thirty minutes and breakfast later, the sync was done, and Windows resumed where James stopped yesterday.
He launched the browser and logged on to his account on the freelancing website. James opened his inbox and searched for the JMH person. His inbox was already filled with so many people, even companies soliciting his work. James was slightly overwhelmed, but he did not panic.
Like he did last time, he sorted them out of the prices they offered, but the highest amount was still the J.M.H person. James stared at the name for a while, before deciding to message them.