Here’s a funny little story that begins with a gift to myself; a Christmas gift, if you will.

As you can imagine, Vampires don’t typically celebrate Christmas, unless of course a small group of easily overpowered carolers happens to wander by. We’re not the kind to trim trees, wrap presents or exchange holiday cards with those excruciatingly long and tragically meaningless yearly updates gleaned from insignificant lives. Some of us were actually alive, in our fashion, 2,000 years ago and it’s amazing just how much you got wrong. It’s like that party game, grapevine, where you whisper something to the next person and so on until at the end of the line you can all laugh about how distorted it became.

Christmas is a boring holiday based on incomplete knowledge cobbled together from a variety of “religions” — but the sales are pretty remarkable.

This year, the ridiculous post-Christmas prices prompted me to purchase a new laptop. When you have lived as long as I, keeping up with technologic advances is exhausting; it changes so quickly. From the videodisc player gathering dust in my spare crypt to the eight-track cassette player in my first hearse, I’m not sure why I even bother. I’m still fighting to contain my skepticism about the printing press while you busy little humans have already moved on to e-readers.

But I refuse to be left behind and the thought of a sleek, portable laptop computer — enabling me to update my little Vlog on the go and peruse the personals for suitable companions for intimate dinners — prompted me to overcome my distaste for crowds and visit one of those all night bargain buster sales. I was amazed and a little overwhelmed at the throngs of humans pushing and fighting for the best deals on mostly worthless items. I’m sure many of them were amazed to find their fingers broken and arms bruised from shoving up against me. I made my purchase and hurried home before doing something the entire crowd would regret, but found myself at a loss.

Plug and play indeed!

After several frustrating nights of attempting to connect with customer service in a meaningful way, the computer was not operational and I was starving. I decided to kill two birds with one stone and called one of those neighborhood computer doctors from a flier tacked to the bulletin board of an all-night Laundromat (that’s a story for another day), the kind with the little tear off tabs. I told him my needs — well, not all of them — and we set up a meeting at a nearby abandoned home (thank you, falling real estate market, for giving me so many, many private places to feed) and with computer in tow, I waited patiently.

Here’s the hysterical part.

Who do you think showed up but a Vampire? It was an old friend of mine who found himself the perfect little plan for gaining after hours entry into the homes of unsuspecting meals. A pocket protector full of pens, a pair of thick glasses and a few memorized computer terms give him a golden, errr, crimson ticket. The geese practically offer up their necks.

Of course, we laughed and laughed but mirth doesn’t put blood in your belly, so we called meals on wheels — a taxi — and split a cabbie … after he drove us to a desolate address deep in the industrial part of town.

After all that, my computer still isn’t working. It’s just sitting their immobile, petrified and making terrible keening sounds. Oh wait, that’s the in-home tech support I ordered.

I think I’m about to upgrade to a mega-bite.

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