Laptop + water = humility

Saturday afternoon. Neesha is finishing up dinner for a party that is supposed to begin in the next hour or so. I'm in charge of making sure the kids don't climb into the oven when it is open. Or closed. To that end, The Boy is playing with his cars on the counter, The Queen is sitting in her Bumbo throne next to him, and I'm sitting between the two. To my side is the open laptop, deliberately placed out of The Queen's reach. Neesha asks me to bring something upstairs from our cold storage. I set down a glass of water between The Queen and the laptop, pick up The Boy (he has an abnormal fascination with our cold storage, despite all I've told him about the monsters and what they do to little boys' toy cars) and head downstairs.

When I get to the basement I hear Neesha yell. My first thought is that she has fallen into the oven, despite all the training films. I run upstairs to see her holding the laptop over the counter, water raining from the keyboard. My glass is laying on the counter at the foot of the Bumbo, conspicuously empty. The Queen, brow furrowed in curiosity, is watching her mother frantically trying to dry the laptop with some paper towels.

I understand that water and laptops do not play well together, so I started to think about all the critical content we stood to lose.

• A talk on humility Neesha had spent two weeks preparing for the following day
• All of our finances
  
• Eight years worth of personal study
  
• 75GB of music
• Eight years of pictures
• The next great American novel
• Conclusive evidence of the government's culpability in the cattle mutilations of the 1950s and their covering up Mothman
  

We quickly turned off the laptop, tipped it upside down so the water could drain out through the keyboard, and left it that way for the length of the dinner party. That night, we turned it on and everything worked just fine, except we lost the novel (Melville and Hemingway never had to work under these deplorable conditions) and the conspiracy theory (I now suspect The Queen of being a government agent, and probably a Republican). We breathed easier and learned that we have to think tactically to at least two levels when keeping objects out of The Queen's Radius of Destruction.

Monday night. I sit down in the same chair at the counter after dinner. The Boy is playing with his cars on the counter. Next to him, The Queen is sitting in her Bumbo throne. To my side is the open laptop, deliberately placed out of The Queen's reach. I set a glass of milk down in front of me, coincidentally between The Queen and the laptop, unaware that she is carefully watching. The moment I let go of the glass, she lunges for it, tipping it toward the laptop.

Gratefully, she did not bring her A game. The glass teeters momentarily before settling upright on the counter. I move the glass before she can lunge again, having just learned that I need to think tactically to at least two levels when keeping objects out of the The Queen's Radius of Destruction.

mw