As a writer, have you ever lost your work forever? I’ve lost many drafts because of faulty computers. At one point, I was a Windows guy, going through them, destroying them—not the works, the computers. They were pieces of trash. Nothing against Bill Gates, but there was a reason why they cost so little and why Macbooks cost so much. I could buy a Windows computer for under five hundred dollars, and I did many times.

One day, at a coffee shop on Wilshire, I left my laptop—I think it was a Dell—sitting on a magnetic table where people could charge their phones. I was talking to a friend there. He’s not a friend anymore, not after what he said to me. We stood outside, smoking cigarettes next to my car, and he said, “Ben, you should give up being a writer. Find something else to do.”

I said to myself, “You’re over, pal. I don’t need you and your negative vibe in my way.” But I never told him. I just kept the anger inside and never went to see him again.

When I went back to my computer, the screen wouldn’t turn on. I pressed keys and kept pressing keys. The panic button in my nervous system had already been depressed. I kept jabbing away, but the screen wouldn’t turn back on.

“What’s wrong?” my shitty friend said.

I thought, “Shut up and get out of my way.”

The laptop made no sound and was completely dead. It was like the magnets in the table had somehow overpowered it.

I took the computer to the mall, where there was a Windows store, but they couldn’t help me. The people were useless. They stood around in their collared shirts and told the customers to wait all day to be helped. That or they flat-out ignored them. I was flat-out ignored, and my computer was dead.

They finally brought it to the back, where I guessed a computer laboratory existed, and I waited around for an hour for them to come back out with it. The lady in the collared shirt who was helping me returned with my dead laptop. She didn’t even tell me what was wrong with it. Instead, she began trying to upsell me for a more expensive computer.

All the work I’d saved on it was lost forever. That was my last Windows computer. After that, it was all Mac computers.

This was before the real advent of cloud services when I drained laptops. Now, I need to worry about losing any work as long as the cloud is synced up. But anyway, I lost several things that day: a friend and the last draft of my screenplay and novel. No wonder I’m writing about it. My heart still aches.