Cursed by technology

I just went through a mini-catastrophe of sorts when at approximately noon on Saturday, while in the midst of a wild hand gesture I was making, I knocked a bottle of water onto my laptop. For a few moments, it seemed all was well as I tried to soak up the puddle of water upon my keyboard. But then all went black. Despite the efforts of three of my co-workers, we could not get the machine to show any signs of life. Popular opinion was that it just needed to dry out, but we had no idea how long that would take. We tried blow-drying it, but then I started to become paranoid that I was going to melt something important. I couldn't set it outside in the sun due to the unnatural amount of dust in the air here in Khanaqin. I eventually put it under a high-powered ceiling fan for several hours, but even by the next morning, nothing had changed.

By this point, I had reached a state of mild panic due to the fact that I had not backed up anything for the entire two and a half months I had been here. Completely irresponsible of me, but true. Fearing the worst, I sent the laptop up to Suli to be looked at by IT professionals, and had the laptop of a vacationing co-worker sent down here. In the meantime, I was trying to use the desktop computers in our North office, but while I managed to get one to work successfully for a while, all of a sudden the internet ceased to function on that computer. No idea why, but I think it may have happened when I hit a switch I shouldn't have. Then, when my substitute laptop arrived, it took at least 24 hours to figure out that the authentication key for the wireless network had been deleted from the settings. By Monday morning, I still couldn't get online on the laptop and then the entire North office's internet system crashed as well.

Finally - after I finally managed to plug in the right codes and got back online, I received the phone call from Suli telling me that not only did my laptop spring back to life, but no data loss had occurred either. I felt perhaps an unnatural amount of relief in the recovery of a machine, but when one spends at least 16 hours a day with something, it's easy to get attached...