I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure it out. And… I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I’ve wracked my brain trying to figure it out. And frankly, I’m coming up with nothing. I’ve done nothing wrong or inappropriate or offensive or remotely un-gentlemanly. I haven’t told more than my allotted quota of “your mamma’s so ugly” jokes. And certainly, when I asked that girl in the elevator, “What you gonna do with all that junk? All that junk inside your trunk,” I was sincerely curious. The exact reason doesn’t matter, I guess. What matters is that it’s finally happened: The Almighty is smiting me. It’s a painful story, but as always, I’ll tell it like it is.

The very day I learned about electric charge in my physics class – holla to my 12 p.m. Alumni Hall brethren – I returned home to my room later that night, took off my jacket and managed to send a thunderbolt of static charge onto Anjali, my custom-designed, custom-built computer. Yes, I managed to static shock my baby.

Luckily, physics was on my side. As any physics graduate student – or avid fan of Bill Nye the Science Guy, I guess – will tell you, when electricity comes into contact with a surface, it spreads across the outside surface and leaves the inside uncharged. I don’t know why, but it’s the truth, because Google said so. It’s kind of the reason you can safely sit in a big metal shell – your car – during a lightning storm and live to tell about it. For me, this meant that my computer was completely undamaged, and I spent the night alone in my room scouring the Web for, uh, cool sites.

Wrong.

At first, it seemed like nothing had happened. The hard drives – yes, plural – kept humming, the fans kept whirring, and the screens – yes, plural again – kept glowing. It was life as normal in McCormick Hall.

And then the motherboard died, and a part of me died with it. For you non-geeks out there, the “mother” in motherboard, like that in “mothership,” “motherland” or “motherload,” indicates that it’s pretty darn important. As an afterthought, the power supply died, too. Now, there is absolutely no reason to explain why the power supply should go out – I paid 80 bucks for it, it ought to have had circuit breakers or rubber insulation or something. I can take a good guess, however: Karma kicked me in the rear. Karma, God, Yin and Yang, the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever/whatever is in charge of everything decided to intervene and temporarily suspend the laws of the universe.

On a superficially unrelated but completely relevant note, every single one of my professors decided to go digital this semester – quizzes, homework, lecture notes, even office hours are hosted on Courseweb. This means that I have to trudge to David Lawrence at 7:30 in the morning – and throughout the day, really – just to check my e-mail and do my homework. In and of itself, not a fun thing to do, but not a terrible thing either.

Except that You-Know-Who – no, not Voldemort – seems to be dabbling with meteorology as well as physics, forcing me to walk across campus in Category 5 winds and killer snowflakes the size of Texas. Seriously, since when does Pittsburgh weather actually correspond with the actual season? How is it that I was wearing shorts on Jan. 4, and then suddenly, the day my computer was assassinated, it started snowing and hasn’t stopped since?

This just isn’t cool. You can’t just mess with scientific laws like that. I may have possibly – hypothetically speaking – deserved to have been smote, but there have to be better, more creative ways to smite people these days. I don’t know, you could send me back to my junior year prom or make me relive the day my dad gave me “the talk.” That would be appropriately cruel.

I’ve had a lot of time to think in the last few days, and I keep wondering what laws of nature are going to go out the window next. Will my cells starting sucking up toxins instead of spewing them out? Will electrons decide that negative charge just isn’t worth it anymore? Will the nice guys actually have a chance? I don’t know, and it’s freaking me out.

There wasn’t really a moral to this story. I’m just sitting here at David Lawrence on a Friday night, having been kicked off the Hillman computers at 10 p.m., savoring the feeling of the keyboard beneath my fingertips. I don’t want to go, and I won’t, either. I’m a nerd. I have nothing better to do. No hot date for me tonight because – karma be damned – some things just never, ever, ever change.

In His good graces? E-mail Ravi at [email protected].