It was not even eight in the morning when I got a call from Swami. His voice was strained.
“Disaster looms. My laptop,” he said. “It’s dead.”
“What do you mean, dead?” I asked.
“It’s stuck. Frozen. I can’t open anything. And I have a client presentation with Raichand at ten.”
By the time I reached his flat, Swami was tapping his keyboard like a man trying to restart an old scooter. His hair was dishevelled, his forehead shiny with sweat.
“Look at this,” he groaned, pointing at the screen. “Raichand saddled me with this relic. I knew it would betray me.”
Vidya came in with her coffee. “Maybe the laptop also needs a performance bonus to start,” she said drily.
Swami glared at her. “This is not a time for jokes, Vidya. I could lose everything if this presentation fails.”
“Everything?” she asked.
Swami waved her off.
Just then Meera walked in, earphones dangling. She glanced at the screen, then at her father. “Papa, maybe don’t press all the keys at once. Computers don’t respond well to panic.”
Swami shot her a look. “You think this is panic?”
“No,” she said, smiling faintly. “This is vintage Papa.” And she left the room.
Just then, Swami’s phone buzzed. It was Raichand.
“Swami,” came the commanding voice. “That client deck better be ready in two hours. Our call is confirmed at 10 AM sharp. Don’t give me excuses.”
“Yes, sir, absolutely,” Swami said quickly. “Just refining the slides, sir.”
As soon as the call ended, Swami collapsed into his chair. “Refining! I can’t even find them.”
He dialled the IT helpdesk. “Yes, my system is frozen. No, I don’t know about drivers. Restart? I’ve restarted ten times! What updates? I don’t have time for updates!”
He hung up in despair. “They live in another world,” he muttered.
The phone rang again. This time it was Manoj, his overenthusiastic colleague. Swami put it on speaker, a mistake he would regret.
“Swami bhai!” Manoj’s voice boomed. “Don’t worry, I’ve faced this a hundred times. Could be RAM overload. Or graphics driver. Or BIOS corruption. You should clean your cache regularly. Once I fixed it by unscrewing my cousin’s CPU—”
“Manoj, I don’t need your cousin’s history right now,” Swami cut him off.
“But listen, Swami, I can send you a long note—”
“Listen, Manoj, right now, I need to run.”
Swami ended the call, shaking his head. “That man talks so much…!”
The word spread. Colleagues on the Office WhatsApp group were no better.
Ravi: “System crash before client call? I want to see Swami’s face.”
Anita: “Share memes, please.”
Prakash: “Just restart, yaar. Simple.”
Manoj: “Guys, this is definitely a BIOS issue. Let me explain…”
Swami threw the phone aside. “Nobody understands. If this goes wrong, Raichand will roast me. My team will lose face. And I’ll be remembered as the man who killed the deal. That too because of a frozen laptop he couldn’t unfreeze.”
Vidya, unfazed, said, “So many achievements already before breakfast.”
The next hour was spent trying to find alternatives. Meera jumped into the fray, prompted by Vidya asking her to help her shaken Papa. By some miracle, the presentation happened.
When I met him that evening, Swami looked like a man who had narrowly survived a storm.
“You won’t believe how I managed,” he said.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“Thank God the presentation file was on SharePoint. I begged Manoj to mail it to me. Then I downloaded it from my phone and used Meera’s laptop to join the meeting & share the screen.”
“Phew, that was something. A close call,” I remarked.
“Somehow it worked. Half the slides didn’t load properly, but at least I didn’t vanish from the meeting.”
Vidya raised an eyebrow. “So, the world didn’t end.”
“That’s not the point,” Swami said gravely. “It would have, if not for Meera’s idea. IT was useless, Manoj was unbearable, Raichand was furious, and my colleagues were mocking me. Worst day of my professional life.”
She set down cups of coffee. “And yet, the client signed off on the deal,” she reminded him.
Swami grumbled but didn’t deny it.
Jigneshbhai, who had come with me, stirred his coffee calmly.
“You let the machine decide your peace. The laptop froze. You froze. Not necessary,” he said.
Swami sighed. “Easy to say. You weren’t the one with Raichand breathing down your neck.”
Jigneshbhai smiled faintly. “Raichand loses it on you. Machines crash on you. But why should you crash with them?”
Swami blinked, as though the idea hadn’t occurred to him.
Meera, passing by, added with a grin, “Papa, next time just call me before you crash. At least one of us knows how to handle tech and restart.”
Vidya nodded. Jigneshbhai sipped his coffee.
“Machines restart with a button,” he said. “Minds restart with silence.”
***
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