MacBook Woe: A tale of a near Mac disaster, averted by good backups

20.06.2012
This is the sad story of one man's MacBook Pro, its failed hard drive, the aftermath, and then some Monday-morning quarterbacking to top it off.

I reported from San Francisco for the week of Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference this year. invited me to join the rest of the time on location in Northern California. On Friday morning, I hopped on a Virgin America flight home to the east coast.

I was lucky: I had the aisle seat, and the middle seat was empty. In the window seat was a woman whose name I never learned, but whose clumsiness I would become all too familiar with. Let's refer to her as 13F.

Thanks to Virgin's inflight Wi-Fi (and my own lack of discretion), I live-tweeted some of 13F's shenanigans--when she spilled mayonnaise on her iPad, when she bumped her head on her tray table, and when she spilled her freshly-acquired water on my MacBook Pro.

In truth, she didn't spill . It was a freshly-acquired cup (filled, oddly, herself from the sink in the airplane's loo), and it looked like maybe a half a shot glass's worth of di-hydrogen oxide actually made it onto my laptop's screen and keyboard as she maneuvered back into her seat. (I'd stood up to let her back in, folded up my tray, and deposited my laptop on my seat.)