I suffered a minor crisis two weeks ago. Over the course of a rambunctious pre-game, I managed to spill an entire glass of diet Red Bull and Bombay Sapphire onto the keyboard of my IBM laptop. I picked the computer up, turned it over and dumped at least 2 cups of fluid onto my desk. To no avail. As I watched the screen flicker and fade to black, in my altered mind I rationalized that leaving the top open overnight would give it enough time to dry out. The next morning, remembering what I had done, I raced—stumbled—to my desk and anxiously pushed the power button. Multiple times. I anticipated that it might take a few more days to dry out, so I just let it sit, with the screen slightly pointed downward like a flag at half mast.

After forty eight hours, I threw in the towel and phoned home. After admitting to my parents that I had spilled “Gatorade” on my computer, they sent another laptop from our home up with a friend’s father. It was less than a calendar week before I received the new computer, but it felt like eons.

Initially, I was actually not as panicked as I can imagine most people would be if they had just ruined a laptop. That morning, I constantly pushed the power button hoping that, by the grace of Bacchus, the hard drive was not fried and my comatose computer would breathe new life. It didn’t—but all was not lost. About three months before this unfortunate incident, my laptop had developed the peculiar habit of displaying “FAN ERROR” and immediately shutting down whenever I tried to turn it on without vigorously shaking it. I took it to a computer repair place.  I returned to pick it up a long weekend later, and the woman at the desk said that the tech guy could not find anything wrong with the computer and that he could not get the laptop to produce the problems that I had described. Funny thing is, when I took the laptop back home and tried to turn it on, that ominous “FAN ERROR” screen reappeared. So, I decided that my computer was on its way to absolute mechanical failure and purchased an external hard drive. Attention: an external hard drive is the single most important thing you could buy. Even if you aren’t a drunken buffoon (like me), you never known when technology can crap out on you and it is a lot cheaper to buy an external than to have data extracted off of a decrepit hard drive.

Hence, I was lucky enough to have backed up all of the data on my computer about two weeks before “the incident”. Suffice it to say that was probably the luckiest occurrence of my life: I am deep in the throes of law school admissions and had stored a plethora of important drafts, resumes, (not to mention 4,000 mp3 files) on my former computer.

Despite the relief of not losing my entire life, it was still incredibly difficult for me to function without a computer in my apartment for an entire week. The initial withdrawal (the first seventy-two hours) were the worst: no morning e-mail checking or reading celebrity gossip blogs without at least a trip across the hall to my friends’ apartment. Unfortunately, their wireless router has been on the fritz and functioned about as well as my laptop, now relegated to the floor with the rest of the detritus. The nearest computer lab to my Spruce St. apartment is in the Gregory Dorm. It was a terrible inconvenience to have to walk there just to know if I had received another “RE: ViAjDhGrA” e-mail in my SAS account or to find out that Harry Morton had, indeed, dumped Lindsay Lohan. And other breaking news.

This incident honestly forced me to reflect on what life is like without the convenience of a computer in my own home. I felt so powerless, so handicapped, so woefully uninformed. And it struck me that I am addicted to this technology: survival without a computer in my apartment was rendered nearly impossible by stymied expectations of communicating with others, functioning productively or staying informed. How could anyone? Oh, that’s right. There must be billions of people in this world who, in their lifetimes, will never use a computer, especially not in their homes. They will never have access to the internet, to the vast array of tracks available in the iTunes store, to the idiosyncratic spelling habits of Microsoft Word. What I thought was utter deprivation was in fact the “depravity” that defines the lives of the vast majority of people in the world. 

Aside from feeling guilty about being angry at the inconvenience of not having a computer, I actually began to adapt to my new “habitat.” I was able to wake up every morning for one week straight and take a practice LSAT (which lasts about 3 hours) without being able to check Facebook between every 35 minute section.

I am immensely grateful that I have a laptop back in my life. I am now making a conscious effort to use it as productively as possible, but it’s hard when there are so many fun things to do besides troll around on Law School Admissions Council’s electronic application interface. Most importantly, I learned my lesson about liquids and laptops: like Scott Ward and young boys, they should probably be kept apart.