The Broken Laptop

Iris was in the final stretch of her English homework when the laptop screen went black without a hint of warning. She had written two full pages about her favourite film and had even added a photograph from the trailer, but with a sinking feeling she realised she had no idea when she had last saved the document. The deadline was the following morning.

At first she did what most people do and pressed the power button repeatedly, as if persistence alone could revive it. Nothing happened. The thought of rewriting everything from memory made her feel slightly sick. She rang her brother, who listened to the story and asked a question so simple that it was almost insulting: “Is the charger actually plugged in?”

Iris looked at the cable. One end was firmly in the wall socket, but the other had worked itself loose from the laptop, probably when she had shifted her chair an hour earlier. She pushed it in until it clicked and waited. After a long minute the screen flickered into life, and her writing program greeted her with a message offering to restore an earlier version of the document.

Most of the work was there. Only the last sentence, which she had been polishing when the screen died, had disappeared. Iris read through both pages from the start to be sure nothing else was missing, rewrote the sentence, and saved the file under a clear name. Then she sent a copy to her own email address, a precaution that would have seemed excessive to her an hour before.

The next day she handed in the homework on time. When she explained what had happened, her teacher took a few minutes at the end of the lesson to show the whole class how to turn on automatic saving. Iris was relieved that the laptop had come back to life, but she was even more satisfied to know what to do should it ever happen again, because she no longer had to rely on luck.