Smoking kills, as the saying goes. But vaping? No one’s quite sure, but the experts seem to think it’s a better bet than the hard stuff. Or so I told myself when I made the switch.
But vaping can be pretty expensive. One way to save money is to recharge your own e-cigarettes. And the easiest way to do that is by plugging the cartridges into your computer.
So it’s last summer, a week to go until my new book is due. The vaping ramps up. In fact, I’m on my computer most nights, tapping away, e-cigarette plugged into the USB portal. I tell my wife it’s like a twenty-first-century version of F. Scott Fitzgerald and his cocktail cabinet. Apart from the fact I’m no F. Scott, she points out.
Then three days before the deadline, something strange happens. The letter ‘k’ stops working. Not great, obviously, but it’s only a ‘k’, maybe I can press on for a few sentences and it’ll come back to life; a cake crumb stuck beneath the key, perhaps. But then the cursor starts to dart around the screen, as though my computer is being controlled remotely. And it’s not just ‘k’ now, it’s ‘t’ and ‘e’. Suddenly the cursor stops moving. It winks at me a few times, then starts deleting words. Slowly at first, to get a taste of it, then at an extraordinary pace, sweeping backwards, so I can see whole chapters of the book disappearing, Parts 4 then 3 vanishing before my eyes.
‘No!’ I shout as I try to wrestle control. But the cursor won’t respond – nearly half the book is gone now, and it’s not slowing down.
I abandon the mouse, holding down the off-button until I hear a great sigh of relief heave from the computer’s bowels. Once my own breathing has steadied, I turn the thing back on.
And that’s when the screaming starts. Not mine, but the computer’s. Somewhere between a stuck pig and a poltergeist: ‘Waaaaaa…’ A dark safety-mode screen appears, but I still can’t use the cursor to press any buttons. And the screaming… My wife runs into the room and I glance round as though I’ve just been caught committing a violent crime.
She covers her ears, and I switch off the computer again. Then she points at the e-cigarette charger protruding from the USB socket. It’s almost too hot to touch.
This was on Friday night. The book was due in on Monday.
Eventually, via a friend of a friend, we track down a computer expert willing to make late-night house calls. It might have been easier to find a GP. Five minutes in and he rubs his forehead. If he could have called for the last rites, he would have. ‘Your computer,’ he says, ‘to use a technical term, is toast. Now where’s your external hard drive?’ I shake my head, and he blanches. ‘USB stick?’ No again.
The man looks more scared than me. Then I tell him that from time to time I forward a draft manuscript to a hotmail address. His colour returns. ‘All we need now,’ he says, ‘is a functioning computer.’
From the top cupboard of our bedroom, we dig out my wife’s ancient Toshiba laptop, long since retired. When it’s resurrected, we open up the hotmail file. And then the work begins.
The book in question was called ‘Sleeping Dogs’. It might have been called ‘Waking Nightmare’. I’m still writing on the old Toshiba now. And no e-cigarette will ever enter my study again…
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