Today I forgot my laptop on the tube. Which doesn’t seem so bad when you type and read the words written there, cursor blinking silently on the screen. But when you actually live the horror of having left your drafted Master’s thesis and a year’s worth of research and notes on that single fucking 15” Hewlett-Packard PC, that realization alone is enough to make you go insane. Luckily for me, in the face of adversity I am rendered an idiot. Instead of running up the stairs, staggering desperately to ground level where I could seek help from the Underground Transit staff, I stood there speechless, incapacitated, as the Picadilly train continued westward, my gray laptop case sitting lonesome against the plastic panel where I left it. However, one of the horrible truths about the human condition is that in our misery we find comfort in other people’s greater misery—and when you find out from one security guard that people have left such valuables as say, children, on the tube, you don’t really feel all that bad. I mean, sure, I’d have to write that shit all over again; I’d have to piece together incoherent drafts via sent emails; I’d have to fight the image of some slovenly dead-beat man with greasy sideburns getting off on my photos from Vegas or that one night when my friends thought it’d be hilarious to catalog my drunken decline; I’d have to wonder how to pay for another laptop while I otherwise cusp on being entirely broke—but at least I didn’t leave behind a pulsing, breathing, swaddling infant.
Three hours later I got a phone call saying they’d found a laptop after the train had traveled to and from Heathrow Airport. They told me to come and pick it up. I told them that I was done defecating in my pants. But you know, Jesus loves me and all that. I’ve never been so relieved in my life.
