Lucky me

A couple evenings ago, while drinking heavily and working on my personal laptop, the phone rang.

Having already answered the phone at least 4,000 times that day, and having had 3,999 of those calls be for my husband…I picked up the ringing phone and handed it across the table to said husband, looking at him (and not the phone) and saying testily, “It’s probably for you!”

Attached to the phone was the cord of my hands-free set.

Which looped around the bottom of my wineglass like a lariat…

…lifted the wineglass…

…swung it over the top of my laptop…

And then poured the lion’s share of the merlot right down the keyboard of my laptop.

Words best not repeated were uttered. Frantic activity ensued. Two days of drying was accomplished. With baited breath, we tried to turn it on this morning.

Apparently, my laptop cannot hold its booze.

Oh, poop.

So we’re doing a little bit of surgical intervention through methods devious to get the recent data off the drive before sending the machine itself off to Dell for repairs – during this process, the laptop will be returned to the state it was in when first I got it. All programs will have to be reinstalled. All settings will have to be replaced. A new motherboard will probably be installed.

It’ll be a clean slate.

This is one of those moments when I find myself pondering the nature of luck.

Some people think of luck as being…an entity. An exterior force. Something that is put upon you, and is what it is. In which case, spilling merlot into your laptop is ‘bad luck’, plain and simple.

I think it’s a matter of how you view things.

It could be argued that dumping an entire jumbo-sized glass of merlot into your laptop, frying out your motherboard and $DEITY only knows what else in the process, could be nothing but pure bad luck.

And goodness knows I’m not sitting here saying, “Isn’t it great? Now I have to have my laptop completely rebuilt, losing the use of it for heaven only knows how long! And then I’ll have to spend goodness-only-knows how many hours reinstalling software and restoring data! Wheeeeeeee!”

But at the same time…it is not all bad. It happened while the machine still under warranty. It happened when we have not one, not two, but three other Dell laptops in the house, any one of which can readily and without any convoluted shenanigans be used as a host body for the hard drive. I don’t have to go back a month to my last backup – I can get my data right up to the Point Of Spillage.

And the laptop has desperately needed to have a major overhaul done. Desperately needed it. I’ve been dreading the task. Backing up the data, wiping the drive, reinstalling the operating system and doing all the endless updates and so forth and so on…

And now, most of the really irritating work will be done by Dell technicians. All I have to do is reinstall a handful of small programs and restore my data files.

How sweet is that?

I’m one of the luckiest people I know, I really am…