Once upon a time in a strange land (California), a man went to an institution of higher learning, sat down at his place at a table, and opened his laptop computer. It was a beautiful and wonderful laptop, from the land of Dell, with amazing powers of computation – not to mention wonderful games to play during class.

This same man also had sitting in his immediate vicinity a cup of magical elixer from the land of Starbucks, a liquid powerful enough to keep the man awake during the most tedious of lectures. Not that, of course, lectures at the land of Biola EVER fell into that cateory; however, the man was always prepared just in case.

As the man sat down at his table, opened his laptop and put down his coffee, all the while greeting his fellow learners and distinguished professor, a strange force – we’ll call it absentmindedness – swept over the man, and his left hand struck the Starbucks container, dumping the magic liquid all over the table, affecting not only the table, but the computer as well. Immediately, the man jumped into action, removed 3,571 napkins from  a nearby cabinet, and promptly and dilligently cleaned up the liquid from the table and the computer. Alas, the freshly-printed assignment waiting to be turned in now displayed random brown spots, but there was nothing that could be done about that.

The computer appeared to work just fine for a while following the cleanup procedure, and the man thankfully sat in front of it as class began. It wasn’t until, with the man’s hands well away from the computer, the letter “a” began to type itself hundreds of times across the Word document that the man realized something didn’t seem right. As the learning institution is conservative in its theology, the man immediately ruled any sort of demonic activity or wizardry, and his mind at once thought, “I bet it’s the coffee.”

The man promptly turned off the computer, all the while giving no impression the rest of the class that anything was amiss. The man then attempted to restart the computer, whereupon a LOUD series of beeps emitted from the machine, almost in a mocking fashion, as if to say, “You idiot – this is your fault for allowing yourself to ever enter Starbucks in the first place all those years ago.” Shutting down the computer immediately, the man attempted to turn on the machine again during the class break – with the same results.

Upon  returning home several hours later, the man reported his sad tale to the lady of the manor, Lady Kelley, who in some ways shared his sadness, but in more ways found the situation humorous and found an opportunity to point out the perils of coffee and computers being near each other. Not to be discouraged, the man tried the machine again and although he received the same beeping noise, he did manage to get the machine to log on. In what could only be classified as a genuine miracle, comparable in importance to sightings of the Virgin Mary in grilled cheese sandwiches, the machine was fixed (even though the original incident occurred in an institution of conservative theology). However, the miracle was short-lived, as within 10 minutes the letter “a” began once again to appear on the screen, along with other disconcerting issues.

The next morning, the man tried the machine again, with better results – meaning, it took a lot longer for the letter “a” to show up – but it eventually did, which made writing emails a little challenging. Not to be discouraged, and desperately needing his beloved Dell computer, the man searched and found a nearby wise man (i.e., geek) in the land of Lomita, only a few miles from the land of Torrance. The wise man’s establishment was called Fusion Computers, and the geek was not at all intimidated by the condition of the machine. In less than 15 minutes, he had disassembled the unit, determined there was no damage to vital organs, thoroughly cleaned the machine, and reassembled it. He then put the machine through rigorous testing (i.e., he typed “a” a billion times), with no difficulties whatsoever. The machine was fixed.

The moral of the story? It is two-fold…

1. Be careful with coffee and computers;

2. If you live anywhere near the South Bay, go to Fusion Computers! (He didn’t charge me to check it out and clean it!)