As some of you might know, I like to write out of the house using an old Macintosh laptop. That caused me a bit of a headache earlier today.

I took my trusty old laptop to a local Mexican restaurant with the intention of writing during lunch. When I opened the laptop, the desktop was grayed out and there was a strange error message telling me that some kind of serious error had occurred and that I needed to power down the computer at once. (If the computer is smart enough to know that an error serious enough to prevent me from doing anything but powering it down has occurred, it should at least be smart enough to power itself down and save me the trouble.) Anyway, I held down the power button, as it instructed, and nothing happened. It stayed on, with the error message taunting me.

After trying holding down the power button several times to no avail, I just took out the battery. That did the trick.

But the joke was on me: when I tried to restart the computer, nothing happened. No error message, no Mac error screen, no gray screen of nothingness (besides gray), no blinking question mark. Not even a flicker from the green power light.

I immediately heard a line of dialog in my head. The line in question came from a climactic scene in Dean Koontz’s Tick Tock, in which a demon attempts to break into the home of the Vietnamese woman who created it:

“This not good.”

It was more than “not good.” There on the laptop’s hard drive, which I can get to do nothing, are four chapters of my novel I’ve been working on (and re-working) over the past two months, when my Sweeps-drained brain found time and desire to actually work on it.

I tried the old pep talk that seems so appropriate at times like this: “It’ll come back on. I’ll just plug it in and give it a few minutes.”

Didn’t work.

Then I tried the second pep talk strategy: “If I sit down with the last few chapters, I’m sure I’ll remember exactly what was there. It’ll all come back to me with no problem.”

I wasn’t buying that one, either.

So I called a couple of computer repair centers and asked around. I’m not sure exactly how old this particular model of Powerbook is, but it is old enough that no computer repair stores or even the Apple Store itself will even bother to service it if something goes wrong.

I can understand Apple taking this position: they want me to buy a new computer. Got that. But it surprised me to find out that computer repair companies would be likely to turn me down as well. When I asked about this, it was explained to me that the parts are either hard to find or outrageously expensive — if not both — and I would be better off just to replace the machine. But one local guy offered to salvage what was on the hard drive this afternoon.

Holiday service? At no additional cost? This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!

I met up with him and he was able to get those chapters to my trusty thumb drive. As he worked, I noticed that he transferred the files I needed into a folder on his laptop, and then from there onto my thumb drive. His laptop, I was surprised to discover, is a MacBook Pro.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “Most IT guys I know hate Macs. You’re the first one I’ve ever met who had a Mac laptop.”

“I wouldn’t trust one who didn’t.”

I love this guy.

After making sure the files actually made it to the thumb drive and deleting them from his computer (yes, I saw him!), he tinkered with the computer and was able to perform a “Power Management Reset” — whatever that’s supposed to be — and the machine actually came back to life. Bonus!

He did advise me to start shopping for a new laptop. He suggested the models to consider, and that the base model would be more than enough for what I needed. So eventually, I guess I’ll have to get something new. For now, though, I’m back in business. For a lot cheaper than it would have been otherwise.

So all you writers out there, kindly consider this as that friendly tap on the shoulder, a reminder to save everything, then backup everything to floppy disk or CD so that if your computer dies, your writing projects aren’t lost.

That’s my next task, too.