Computer karma

There was a time long ago when, in identical circumstances, I probably never would have learned that a distant acquaintance from high school who is also a writer but lives in New York caused irreversible computer damage yesterday morning by spilling coffee -- with milk -- on her keyboard.

But that long-ago time was before Facebook. And I didn't spend long on Facebook yesterday morning, honest. I spent three hours drafting a story about a food writer who just published a book about lobsters. A quick glimpse at Facebook before breaking for lunch was supposed to be my reward for my diligence.

I read the post with, frankly, little interest. "A little coffee on the keyboard? How bad can that be?" I shrugged to myself. "If keyboards couldn't withstand the occasional coffee spill, you wouldn't see them on every single table in Starbucks, right? I'm sure it will fix itself in no time."

Well, anyone who agrees with my that the goddess Fate has a sharp sense of irony can guess what happened next. I reached over to close my laptop and knocked over my water bottle. Right onto my keyboard.

But I grabbed it and righted it in no time. Two, maybe three tablespoons of water at the most had actually landed on the computer. "No problem," I reassured myself. "It's just lucky I drink nice clean water rather than milky sugary coffee, and it's lucky I have reasonably fast reflexes."

Wrong, of course. When I returned to my desk after lunch, my keyboard was utterly unresponsive. No vowels. No consonants. No space bar. No hard return. No numbers or symbols or shortcut keys. Nothing.

I put out the cry for help every way I knew: on Facebook, on Twitter, via email (to a friend who is an IT expert), by phone (to my husband, who I already knew probably wouldn't have time to help me with a computer fix until approximately halfway through Labor Day weekend).

Responses and advice poured in. I followed it all. I wiped the computer thoroughly with a chamois cloth. Then I borrowed a hair dryer from my mother-in-law and ran the hair dryer over the keyboard for about twenty minutes. Then I put the computer next to a pedestal fan and ran cool air over it for another ten minutes. Then I submerged my computer in a pan full of uncooked rice. (Apparently this is a great trick to deploy if your cell phone gets submerged in water. The dried rice absorbs the moisture. I've repeated the adjective "dried" preceding "rice" here in hopes of lowering the inevitable odds that someone will think I said to do this with cooked rice.)

Then I did another hair dryer treatment. After that, the whole body of the computer seemed overheated to me, so I wrapped it in a cool damp towel. It really would have made more sense to just send my laptop to a day spa and ask for "The Works," with hot stone massage and apricot facial most definitely included.

Now I'm letting my computer rest. We'll reevaluate later today. I have a different computer to work on in the meantime, and if I may indulge in a brief moment of self-righteousness, there is nothing on my regular laptop that I had neglected to back up -- yes, I learned that lesson the hard way and won't make that mistake again -- so I'm not worried about any particular files. I just want to be able to use the computer itself again sometime soon.

So in the end, lots of lessons learned. Don't snicker at your friends -- or your distant acquaintances -- when bad luck befalls them even in the form of a knocked-over coffee cup: you'll probably be next. Keep files backed up. Have plenty of uncooked (did I mention it has to be uncooked?) rice on hand. If you care about your computer, be prepared to indulge it with a full spa treatment at any time.

And, of course, no more full water bottles near the keyboard. The goddess of Fate might just catch me being dismissive of other people's computer problems once again, and this time the repair could be a lot more complicated than A Day at the Spa.

Divine humor

My aunt wrote yesterday to tell me that her camera, which went missing over Labor Day weekend while she was at home in Aspen, turned up three days later in her son’s car at Zion National Park. At the end of the fairly brief account, she implied that this was a story I should include in my blog.

It’s a little bit second-hand for my standards of blogging, but it’s a useful story to me anyway because it reminds me of how much I savor these little moments of grace. We all pay attention when bad things happen, and use those moments to contemplate the nature of Fate, or of God, or of luck and happenstance, or whatever governing force each of us believes in. And so too when really significant good things happen, like the arrival of a baby or an unexpectedly encouraging medical diagnosis. But it’s also important to acknowledge the trivial blessings – such as when you find a missing camera.

My theory is that these moments serve as proof that the Divine can be whimsical. It is one thing to believe that there is a guiding spirit who controls life-or-death matters; it is quite another to believe that this same spirit takes time to attend to the most trivial of circumstances. If God is working on the outcome of conflict in the Middle East, we might wonder, why would God take a moment to reveal that a lost camera fell between the seat cushions in someone else’s car?

A couple of months ago, I needed to find a store receipt so that I could make a return, but the receipt had been stuffed somewhere in a folder that held hundreds of other receipts, filed in no particular order. “I just don’t have time to go through these,” I thought. “The only way I’ll be able to do the return is if the receipt simply appears in front of me.” The next receipt I plucked out of the stack was the one I needed. And then a day or two later, I was setting up my mother’s new computer and couldn’t figure out how to access the wireless network at my parents’ house. I guessed at several different passwords and then suddenly, almost randomly, hit on the right one.

I love these Divine surprises. It’s as if once in a while the powers that be take a break from really important problems to just play a little friendly joke on us: something whose outcome really doesn’t matter all that much compared to, say, war or illness, but just makes us feel smiled upon. That’s how I felt when I hit on the wireless code and when I found the receipt, and my aunt’s camera story reminded me of this feeling: the sense that you’re just being given a small but meaningful gift even though it’s not a special occasion. Moments of grace, just sprinkled in our paths to remind us of the importance of taking time to acknowledge gratitude.