Beware of screens

About a year ago after I arrived in Waterbury, Connecticut, I covered my first murder story. It was literally “a dark and stormy night.” I did not work in the main office. I shared a bureau with another reporter, about a ten-mile drive from Waterbury. My bureau partner was covering something much more pedestrian, almost certainly some tedious meeting that would go on for some time.

I was in touch by phone, of course, with my editor in Waterbury. Then lightning struck, and our bureau lost power. Moments later, I got a phone call from Chuck Dixon, my editor. Chuck was a throwback. It didn’t seem that he got much exercise. He drank quite a lot, favoring the hard stuff. He liked to play poker. And he was a good storyteller. He wore a trench coat, and soon I went out and bought a trench coat for myself.

 But this particular story almost ended up as a debacle for me. When I reached Chuck by phone, he was livid. Rather than writing down my story with ink and paper, and dictate to Chuck in the main newsroom, I had decided to write my story on my computer screen, which I had never done before. What was I thinking? Where was the rest of my story? Had it vanished into the ether? I was horrified. And keep in mind, this was a murder investigation. Thousands of subscribers would be reading my story the next morning. Or would they? In 1985, computers were still unreliable things. The notes I had typed into my screen had vanished when my office lost electricity. I felt ill.

Fast forward to the present. Most computers remain delicate—exceedingly so. Just spilling a few ounces of water can be dire, as I did recently. And what was at stake? Oh, not much. Just a book about Alzheimer’s that I had been working on for the past three years. This isn’t a hulking tome. But it distills the knowledge I accumulated over those three years since I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. And as my fellow local writer Leslie Hergert has shown, a 100-page manuscript can speak louder than a 500-page book, if the writer has the nuance to pull it off.

I was already thinking about how I could salvage parts of my electronic manuscript. Not everything was bad. I did still have my first two chapters on a flash drive. Chapter 2 is especially important, because it describes the two years when I was still working, but didn’t yet have a diagnosis.

And because I had access to my blogposts, all 125 of them, I could have retyped any blogpost was worth with be retyped. But that would have been extremely tedious. But the savior in this saga is Paula, my wife. From the time we met in 1989, I grasped that Paula was very handy around the house. I am quite the opposite. Despite growing up in a commercial fishing family, I never got the hang of doing simple handyman tasks. But Paula has always impressed me with her handy-person skills.

But when the almost fateful spilled glass of water went past the tipping point, I knew what do. I had heard other people mention that the first thing to do if you spill water on your MacBook is to flip the device and let the water drain out. And I did that immediately.

At that point, there wasn’t much else I could do. But what would have been ruinous was if I had been drinking any kind of juice, rather than water. During those two days, I deferred to Paula. Without Paula’s handy-person skills, we might have had to pay roughly $800 or more to the Apple Store. (During my confusion and anxiety, I wasn’t clear whether there was any way to retain my files. At that time, ignorance was something approximating bliss.)

What Paula did was to create a little tent from the MacBook on top of a crate and place a small fan beneath it so the precious computer files could slowly dry. We also got early to the Apple Store, so we didn’t waste time to see what the extent of the damage would be. That weekend happened to coincide with this year’s Walk to End Alzheimer’s, and many of my cohorts at the Alzheimer’s Association were on hand. It took a few days for me to really believe that this nightmare had ended with a pleasant ending.