Ka-Boom

Of course, before finishing the manuscript mentioned below, I encountered some trouble. I was sitting in my office, typing along, when suddenly there was a huge clap of thunder and my computer and monitor both went dead. Now, I knew there was a storm coming in, but there hadn't been any thunder so far. The lightning bolt that struck right by my office was the first one of the afternoon.

I had no idea whether or not my computer was fried, but naturally I assumed the worst. I use that computer only for writing and it wasn't that expensive, but I didn't want to lose all the data stored on it. I save my work on the computer's hard drive, on a floppy drive, and on a jump drive that I carry around with me. I had saved the file on the hard drive just a minute or so before, but not on the floppy or the jump drive. I carried the floppy into the house to check and see how much of the file was on it, and I found that it was eight pages short of the point I was at in the writing. I hate losing pages and having to recreate them, so I did a lot of angry muttering as I walked back out to the office.

When I got there, though, I noticed that the CD player that was also plugged into the same UPS as the computer and monitor was also dead. So I kept my fingers crossed that it was the UPS that was fried, not the computer. I unplugged the computer and monitor from the UPS, plugged them directly into wall sockets, and lo and behold, the computer came back on. The UPS was also a surge protector, and it did its job, saving the computer from being ruined. I wound up losing only a couple of paragraphs, and that was no big deal. If I had lost the whole eight pages, I'm sure I would have been so disgusted that I wouldn't have finished the book today.