There’s nothing fun about your computer dying, especially when you’re a writer and you haven’t backed up files in… well, never.

That, as you may have guessed, is exactly what happened to me last weekend. First things started to move sluggishly. Then my laptop wouldn’t shut down. When it finally did, it wouldn’t turn back on. Even my Apple engineer roommate couldn’t fix it. That’s how I found myself curled on in a ball on the floor, frantically playing through my mind a list of all the files I’d doubtless lost. It was, in short, no fun.

However, once I’d calmed down, my roomy recovered most of my files, and I realized life was in fact not over, it occurred to me I did learn a few things from this gut-wrenching experience. Here then are the life lessons taught to me by a dying computer, shared with you in the hopes that you never have to experience the horrible feeling of laptop loss for yourselves:

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