Well, not literally.

Around 5am this morning my son (2 years old) thought the laptop looked thirsty.

So, he gave it something to drink.

My wife saw him a few seconds later and freaked out. Not wanting to wake me without knowing the state of the machine she turned it on.

If you heard a “Pfffzzzzzt” this morning at around 5am EST, that was my laptop.

We took it into BestBuy, and this kind of thing is (fairly) not covered by warranty or extended warranty (both of which I purchased). Okay, I says to meself, all you really need is the data. So, they remove the hard drive (HDD) and plug it into another computer. It registers both parts of the HDD, and then turns itself off. Not a good sign.

At this point, my lappy and my HDD are sitting at Best Buy doing their best to dry out. The “best guy in the city” (of Best Buy’s guys) is working on this. Hopefully he’ll have some success.

Best case scenario is that I head down Friday and hear everything is miraculously working again. The only downside to this is that I may get arrested for sexually harassing an employee when I start showering him with kisses.

Realistic best case? Motherboard and power supply are fried, which is roughly 1K in repairs. Obviously, 1K I don’t have. But, we’ll have to figure that out. If I have the data, I can somehow find that 1K somewhere.

Worst case? Everything’s fried. Data is gone. I lose 1000+ people’s contact information. I lose 25 pages of the book and all my reference material (the rest I can dig up from reviewers and my Technical Editor). I lose dozens of contracts. I lose a lot of work on 3 private projects that haven’t launched yet. And I lose my only computer.

I’m really hoping this ball falls closer to “best case” than “worst case”. If “worst case” happens, I have no idea what I’ll do. I’d be completely at a loss. I might just toss in the towel on this whole blogging and IT thing and become a waiter and Casey’s. They have nice food there.

Or not. Who knows. It’s too early to be making restaurant choices right now (yes, this is me TRYING to be light-hearted about this).

So, end result: if I haven’t emailed, haven’t called, haven’t Skype’d or missed a meeting THIS IS WHY.

The sad part is that I know I’m missing meetings, calls and conference calls, I just have NONE of that information. I don’t even have people’s contact info to tell them why I’m missing this stuff.

It sucks, hard.

I wonder if Casey’s give their wait-staff cotton or polyester uniforms. Polyester really itches at my skin… ;-)