I spilled a bong on my laptop.
A whole bong. It was resting on the mattress because I work from the mattress (a whole other can of worms, and not today’s), and it tipped over the way things on a mattress do — straight onto the keyboard.
I did everything you’re supposed to do. Flipped it. Toweled it. Let it sit. Turned it back on, and every key now did one of two things. Either nothing, or twenty copies of a letter I didn’t press. Hit T, get silence. Hit H, get hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
The keyboard on this thing doesn’t detach. Keyboard goes, laptop goes.
I took it to Mobile Kangaroo. $299 plus my AppleCare+. Three to five business days, except Monday is Labor Day, so.
Never rest your bong on a mattress, no matter how lazy you are.
I’m writing this on Jeff’s laptop, which we’ll get to.
I have a lot of systems. Now that I write them out, I’m realizing how structured they are, and how much they rely on AI to hold the context I need.
There’s the Obsidian vault — about 7,400 notes, years of them, and it’s where everything I know about anything lives. That number includes roughly 450 to 500 Little Yellow Different posts, so call it just under 6,900 notes of actual brain-contents. Scatterbrained thoughts, red herrings, roads I thought I’d go down. It makes my mind feel a little less scattered. I never know which note I’ll need to come back to.
On top of the vault sits a Claude Code instance I use as a chief of staff, which is a fancy way of saying it tells me what matters this morning so I don’t have to sort that out with my own brain, and my brain has ADHD, so thank you. (I’d also been bouncing between Claude Code and Codex on the same vault, just to see how each one reasoned. That experiment’s over. Both out for the count.)
And then there are the two paid projects I have running at the same time, each with its own little AI system underneath it, each due, whether or not I remember the details.
Neither of my two paid projects is what it started as.
Job #1 began as “design my friend’s nanny agency website” and became project management when the back-end vendor turned out to be an all-encompassing platform that apparently requires sixty-plus hours of training just to understand what the hell it does. Job #2 started as “make this workflow a little easier” and immediately added “for as little monthly cost as possible, and by the way, here are some vendor partners” — which also became a project management job.
If these were simple redesigns, I’d be on it. But they’re not. They’re things to track, follow up on, and check against the three other pending items, because a missed note can change what I owe the client next. Meeting notes, phone calls, texts, vendor conversations. A place I can refer back to with some confidence when someone says something and I — or the documents — remember it differently.
Could I do this without AI? Sure. It would be much more stressful, and the context it held would be much easier to lose. The AI held the context. And that context is what’s now sitting in a water-logged machine at Mobile Kangaroo.
The last thing my chief of staff told me before the spill: the requirements shift so rapidly I needed to write a completely new statement of work for Job #1’s client. Contract work is never the sexy part of the job to anyone.
I was locked out of context.
Information is the file. Context is everything that happened around the file — the decisions I made, the calls I had, the thread of reasoning that connects the notes.
The AI knew what I was trying to do with my notes. It knew which project was more urgent this week and why. It knew which vendor conversation was still pending and what I was waiting on.
Open a fresh AI window on a borrowed laptop and start typing? I tried that. It knew about the meetings it had read, but not which meetings still needed to be set up — and I’d forgotten about those myself. It knew the projects it had just read, but not what was on the horizon or what to start worrying about. It had no idea who I was, and rebuilding all of that from scratch — in the week I actually needed it — wasn’t going to happen.
Say someone stops you in the hall and asks what the project is about — the one you’re getting paid for, the one you’ve been in meetings about all month.
You’d have to tell them you don’t know. “So sorry,” you blush. “I’ll check my project notes!” You’re already embarrassed saying that. Then you open your project notes, and your note is essentially one page with a giant question mark — flashing into panic.
That was my Wednesday.
I did not have a laptop, so I borrowed Jeff’s. This is a new Jeff, not the Jeff from the other posts. He referred me to job #1. He offered me the laptop because he was already having problems with it, even though he’d only had it for a couple of weeks. “I think they’re viruses or something,” he said. Whether that means actual malware or just “this is not working the way I expected” is unclear. I’m choosing not to investigate too closely, because I have enough problems. With his permission, we completely reinstalled Windows. Desperate times, desperate measures for everyone.
My Obsidian vault syncs to a private GitHub repo, so I have the vault as it existed at the moment of the spill. I’ve been limping along on that. The vault survived because it syncs to GitHub. The context didn’t. The notes were backed up. The AI’s working history wasn’t — all the accumulated conversations where it had sorted those notes, connected one meeting to another, and learned which loose ends were actually live.
What I have not done is install Obsidian on Jeff’s machine, because downloading nearly 7,000 notes onto somebody else’s already-questionable laptop felt like a bad idea. Except that if I want to add anything from this week to the pile — and I do, every day — that’s the only place it goes.
Fine. It’s downloading.
Putting everything into one AI and letting it hold it all felt like a good idea until this week. Every phone call. Every meeting. Every note I’ve left for myself over the past few years. The problem isn’t convenience. It’s that the system became my context, and when the laptop broke, I lost the thing that let me keep projects, notes, and decisions in one place.
The laptop is still at Mobile Kangaroo. They haven’t called. The timeline runs through at least Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on how the holiday shakes out.
The sync is still running. Ask me next week.