In all my decades of dealing with computers, this has never happened until now: I am torn between two computers. I don’t mean that I can’t decide which computer to buy. These are both computers I possess. And use.

You see, I had one laptop, and I have loved it truly for two years now. It’s been showing signs of age lately, and I’ve been coming to grips with the idea that I will have to replace it. Surely the manufacturer is no longer producing the same model as this perfect gem, since they never do. But my life requires a laptop, like it requires air. I had steeled myself for the occasion.

Then unexpectedly, I was provided with a brand new laptop – a wonderful computer by a manufacturer not my own. And so now, the adult me proceeded to transition my work onto the newcomer. The truth is – that’s been going on for two months, yet here they are side-by-side, both running, both hooked up to the Internet, with nearly identical software and overlapping data, like siblings whose Mother refuses to choose.

I wish that reference to “Mother refusing to choose” hadn’t occurred to me. It just reinforces the idea that I might be abandoning a creature that I cared for and tended, one that loved me back in numerous ways. But I’m not ready to move on! And I need this new laptop as well.

I thought that I must indeed be alone in this dilemma, until mentioned this to several people and got an earful about being torn between the computer that sits on a person’s desk at work, and their computer at home. It turns out lots of people are conflicted, and they each have their tricks for making it all work: The key is the Internet.

Want to make sure you can work on a document at home? Email it to yourself and pick it up with you get home. Want to turn that report you’ve been working on all weekend, and don’t want to come into the office. Email it from home to a colleague, and ask them to print it and drop it off. These are just a few of any number of tricks people use all the time, including moving all data files to their personal websites. It seems that Americans no longer have just one computer they use routinely. Many use multiple computers, pretty much interchangeably.

It turns out that where there’s a will to work, there’s a way.

I must confess that I’m not exactly upset about all this. It works wonderfully for me to have two computers going at once – one focused on one set of tasks, and the other focused elsewhere. With a single computer, I was always shutting down applications and bringing up others. The truth is I’m liking this so much, I started wondering what it would be like if I brought up a third computer just for the heck of it.

Now that I’ve accepted the reality of two laptops at once, I have other things to worry about. How long will this last? And will I always want two computers from here on out?

Push will definitely come to shove when my firstborn laptop bites the dust, and I am pressed to shell out hard cash to keep myself dual-computer equipped.

Will I do just that? Or will I forever recall this time in my life with relish, a time in which I was completely happy, at least from a computational point of view. Only time can tell.

I'm Moira Gunn. This is Five Minutes.