It Rained on My Laptop

Today has been an interesting one to say the least.


I started my out-of-home experience today on the bus, bumping into my neighbor who is quite fond of Rosie, so we have a common interest. Somehow, the conversation turned into her former downstairs neighbors, and if I ever "heard" them, to which I replied no, but I did tell her two highly inappropriate stories about them based on what I saw. Lovely Red Line morning conversation. I tried to be quiet about it, but in the rush-hour sardine can that is the morning Red Line, I'm sure a few nosy passengers heard earfuls.


During the entire chat with her, all I could think about was the MBTA's personal ecosystem of 100% humidity. I sweat in humidity. No exceptions. I even recall glancing around at others - guys in jackets and ties, women primped with hair in place, wondering why I was lucky enough to have received this sweat gene. Good thing it was indeed raining, I think that provided a sufficient excuse for me.

I showed up at work, greeted my co-workers, and walked into my office to find paper towels strewn across by desk. Upon a more careful inspection, I found water under my computer and mouse, and papers crinkled as if they had been wet and then air-dried.

Mother f&*ker, the ceiling leaked onto my laptop.

It's rare that I leave my laptop at work, but did so last night because I didn't feel like carting it back and forth on the T and bus in the rain. And above all, I'm usually commuting to work via car, which was in the shop overnight. Perfect timing.

When I leave my laptop at work, usually I just save my files, leave them in the toolbar, and shut the top, leaving it turned on. That was one of my fatal flaws.

Immediately, I tried backing up files, but my computer quickly displayed a blue screen of doom, and no longer recognized an operating system.

Lovely. 85% of what I do is with Excel, our database, Outlook, or a few web apps.

I scrambled to call our computer consultant, who said that she would come in later and try to salvage the hard drive. My data was backed up through April 4th, so it's not a total loss. But my Outlook email, calendar, and contacts were only backed up through last November. Our technical infrastructure isn't the best, and I'm lucky I backed up what I did, though probably should have been backing up much more regularly. Grrr.

Of course, you also don't expect your laptop to be rained upon when it's at your desk. But it was.

My Dell had grown increasingly more sluggish over the past few months, and when combined with our excruciatingly slow network, made for lots of angry and frustrated working hours. The silver lining here is that I was scheduled for a laptop upgrade in the coming months, and we were 99% sure I was switching to Apple.

Well, the coming months became today. We drove to the Apple store in Chestnut Hill, and my MacBook Pro is now at work (sitting on someone else's desk that's not underneath a leaky roof). The files I had backed up are being transferred this evening.

So, I'm thrilled to have joined the Apple cult with my MacBook Pro. I feel immediately cooler, and no reserve the right to look down upon PC users, wondering when they'll get with the program and make the move away from Windows.

I'm cautiously optimistic that my data is not gone for good.

And I'm happy to have my car back, albeit with $2,100 less in my bank account.

I celebrated my funky day with some ice cream at JP Licks while waiting for the car dealership's shuttle from Davis Square. That hit the spot.