There’s always a moment when you first realize something is wrong that stops you dead in your tracks.
It usually starts as a subtle disconnect. First, you notice something that might not even register consciously, and then instantly your brain starts spinning in a dozen different directions at once.
That’s what happened to me right in the middle of writing a story Tuesday morning. I had two separate Word documents open, one with my transcribed notes and the other with the story. When I went to copy a line from my notes and paste it into the story, my cursor froze.
Since I was in a hurry, trying to get the story finished before anyone could ask me for it, my instinctive reaction was to start sliding the wireless mouse back and forth across the mouse pad. But the cursor still wouldn’t move.
Everything that could have been wrong suddenly rushed through my mind at once. Did my laptop just crash? Did the Wi-Fi go out? Did some malware just take over my laptop? What am I going to do now?
I’d already been having trouble with that mouse lately. Sometimes when I click and drag the cursor across text to highlight it, it won’t select, or it will unselect what I’ve highlighted when I release the button.
That knowledge was somewhere in a dark corner of the back of my mind, not a conscious thought exactly, just the kind of thing that sits there and fires right along with the synapses, subconsciously shaping the panic that follows.
It didn’t point me toward the right answer, or even any answer at all, until I stopped to think it through.
Maybe my battery is dead?
Using the touchpad, I noticed the cursor worked just fine, so I tapped the Bluetooth icon on the screen, which said the battery had 53% remaining.
No dead battery, so maybe the mouse itself had died. Nope. When I turned it off and back on, the red light on the bottom came on, but again, it still wouldn’t move the cursor.
Taking the battery out and putting it back in didn’t solve the problem, and neither did trying a new battery.
Maybe the Bluetooth disconnected? But that couldn’t be, because the laptop still said it was connected when I checked the battery strength.
The mouse had power and was connected to Bluetooth, but the cursor remained stubbornly — mockingly, even — frozen in place.
So here I sit with a mouse that doesn’t work, trying to finish my writing.
A few minutes later, just as I was finishing the story, I instinctively grabbed the mouse when it was time to save the file.
Lo and behold, it worked.
I still have no idea what happened. Maybe my laptop, like a good dog, can smell deadline panic and just decided to pull a prank.
As I clicked save, I was struck by a frustrating realization: Why doesn’t the relief of things turning out okay ever equal the weight of the initial panic?
But that’s another thought for another day, because now the story is done, the file is saved and the deadline is met.
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