Sarah Connor is Right

The machines are out to get us.

How else do you explain the fact that my laptop, just as I've completed my brand-new manuscript, the one that's going to put me on the map (I'm nothing if not confident), suddenly and without warning, shits the bed.

My computer has become nothing more than a one-trick pony, freezing utterly and completely, as dead as your ex-wife's smile, as soon as I try to open anything with it. This includes any of my three completed novels. Or any of my more than two dozen short stories. Or any of the information about literary agents that I have painstakingly compiled over the last two years.

In short, it's a disaster on a grand scale; my personal equivalent of an unsinkable ocean liner striking an iceberg on its maiden voyage and, well, sinking.

And I know what you're thinking: Any idiot knows you back up all your important files, just in case disaster strikes. Well, let me tell you something. I'm not just any idiot, I'm a very special kind of idiot. That'll never happen to me, I said. That sort of thing happens to other people, the ones who don't take care of their valuable electronic gadgetry.

And I take care of my computer, ask anyone in my family if you don't believe me. No new mom has ever treated her infant as well as I treat my laptop. Up-to-date antivirus protection, regular scans, a healthy diet. That little hunk of plastic and weird electronics is my sweet little baby.

Unfortunately, my sweet little baby now has a case of the terrible twos, and will do nothing I ask of it, no matter how many times I say "please."

But all is not lost, and this is why I can still laugh about this disaster. I bought a portable hard drive (Yeah, I know, I know, welcome to the twenty-first century). But I still had a problem. Every time I connected the portable hard drive to my laptop, you guessed it - It froze!

Luckily everyone else in my family is smarter than me. See, my daughter told me about this thing called "Safe Mode."If you start your computer in safe mode, only the basic essentials open up, and sometimes you can work around the problem that way, which is what I tried, and it worked!

So now, all my literary gems are safe inside this brand-new hunk of plastic and weird electronics, and I will be bringing my laptop in for emergency surgery later today. I'm hoping that with compassionate care my baby will soon be as good as new. But it's going to take a long time for that thing to regain my trust.