I’m not going to say who left the cup of water by my laptop, or who knocked it over. Neither actions were done by me, but I don’t consider either of those actions to represent the biggest misfire in this chain of events. I will admit to swearing when I saw what happened, and for the record, I don’t consider that brief verbal reaction to be the biggest misfire here either.

The screen on my laptop immediately went black and then flashed up an error message stating that the solid state drive could not be found. Those of you who personally know me are aware that tech just isn’t really my thing, but even with my deficiencies in technological understanding I knew this had the potential to be pretty bad.

I ran upstairs and asked Andy for his help. He opened up the bottom of my laptop, saw where the water was, and began trying to dry it out. He looked up some stuff, reassembled the device, and still the same message. He told me a can of compressed air would be helpful, and though we haven’t used one in years, I knew where I had last seen it so I scrambled to bring it back.

He looked over his right shoulder at me as he was blowing out the area of the laptop with the solid state drive and he said, “One of the sources I read said that when this type of thing happens, most likely your files are gone and you should probably pray to whatever deity you look to.”

I assured him I already had been. While he was kneeling over the exposed backside of my computer, I was saying a few fervent and frantic prayers. Now, I am not about to preach anything religious to anybody. Your decisions about what you believe or whether or not you meditate or pray are entirely up to you. But for me, I definitely pray and in this case I felt like I had some good reason to. You see, I my friends, had not backed up the files on my laptop in a very long time.

I know.

Certainly it is embarrassing for me to have to even type that out. No judgment from me if you also fall into the camp of forgetting to regularly do that, but it is an important thing to do if you want to protect yourself from any number of unpleasant computer happenings. For me it was immediately clear that this was the biggest reason for concern in the entire chain of events. Yes, the cost of replacing the computer wouldn’t be thrilling if the whole thing had to be scrapped. If all we had to do was swap out the hard drive it probably wouldn’t even be that expensive to do. But some of the potentially wiped out files were irreplaceable and therefore the biggest source of my anxiety.

We plugged in an external hard drive before trying once again to power up my laptop, and the login screen appeared. We got a little bit over 90% of the files transferred before the screen once again blackened and flashed up the now familiar message about the solid state drive. I was relieved though, because all of the most important files had been recovered.

The next morning, we sat down for another attempt at transferring files with my then fully dried laptop. As Andy and I talked, I told him that really I considered the biggest mistake in all of this to have been mine. I mentioned that I was going to put in a weekly alarm on my phone to back up my files. I added that I know I am profoundly overwhelmed and there really isn’t any way for any one person to handle everything sitting on our to-do lists right now, but I didn’t want to make excuses for what happened or avoid trying to be better. And I felt like this was something significant I missed.

He said, “Because you want to take ‘extreme ownership,’ like Jocko.”

Exactly. Andy and I had watched that TEDx talk together a few weeks before this incident and I absolutely loved it. I have long felt something similar, that a problem I can’t acknowledge is within my scope of influence is a problem that will happen repeatedly and can end up be incredibly damaging to everyone I hold dear. To quote Jocko, “When a team takes ownership of its problems, the problems get solved.”

You see, as much as I love to pray every day I really don’t think prayer alone will or did solve this problem for me. My computer did indeed come up again that following morning and has stayed miraculously functioning ever since. Maybe it was prayer, maybe it was getting the water out of the inside as quickly as possible with the compressed air. Maybe, to quote Professor McGonagall’s character from one of the Harry Potter movies, it was “sheer dumb luck.” Whatever was responsible, no amount of prayer will protect me from this kind of mistake in the future if I don’t take the necessary effort to fix and change what I can for myself.

Sometimes I mess things up. I’m tired, I’m overwhelmed, and I’m very busy doing therapeutic things that many people think are foolish or a waste of time to try and help our son. For me it has always been a simple matter. Where I love, I give. And I love both of my children, they have never needed to have a certain level of functioning to earn that love from me. So I’m not here to debate the intelligence or merits of what we are attempting here therapy-wise with anybody who thinks differently, I’m here for other parents who may need some of the information I share. And who may need to see that I am also really struggling to hold everything together sometimes, and sometimes even making mistakes that have the potential to really, really suck for me.

I made a plan not to leave this particular important task unattended to again. I haven’t been shutting off that weekly “backup your files” alarm on my phone without acting. Yes, it’s one more thing for me to do, but if I’m honest I have a couple fluffy things I have been doing that I could do a little less of to find five minutes a week to fix this. I personally made the most harmful mistake in all of this, and I own that. I owned it to every one else whose actions contributed to the chain of events that left my laptop soggy. And I own it to you.

And, if you’re at all interested in watching that TEDx talk, I’m leaving a link below.

“Extreme Ownership,” by Jocko Willink