A Day Without My Laptop

On 1 October 2026, I came back to my room after college and realized that I did not have my laptop charger with me. I had forgotten it at college.

I immediately called a few of my friends who live in the hostel and asked if they could help me get it. Unfortunately, the college had already closed by that time, so there wasn’t much they could do. I opened my laptop and checked the battery. It was at 35%.

I knew I would have to spend the rest of the day without my laptop. There wasn’t much I could do about it at that point, so I decided to deal with it the next day.

The next day was a holiday, but I still decided to go to college. I figured I could just go there, pick up my charger from the lab, and come straight back. It should have been simple, right? It wasn’t.

When I reached the college, the security guards stopped me at the entrance and refused to let me in. Since it was 2 October, Gandhi Jayanti, the college was closed for the holiday, and students were not being allowed inside. I tried explaining the situation, but the guards still refused to let me enter.

At that point, I did not really know what else to do. So I called my friend Bhoumic, who lives in the hostel, and asked if he could go and check the lab where I had left the charger.

He went to the lab, but unfortunately, that did not work either. The lab was locked, and the workers refused to open it. So even he could not retrieve the charger.

After all that, I had no choice but to go back empty-handed. Anyway, a huge thanks to Bhoumic for helping me out. I really appreciate the effort, even though we could not get the charger that day.

Now I had no charger, no way to get into the college, and a laptop that I could barely use anymore. I had to spend the entire day without it.

For most people, spending a day without a laptop might not be a big deal. For me, it felt like hell.

I am a tech nerd. My laptop is involved in almost everything I do — development, machine learning, algorithmic problem-solving, reading, experimenting, and learning. Even when I am not working on something specific, I usually have a browser, editor, terminal, documentation, or some random technical project open.

Suddenly, a big part of my usual day was just missing. What I found interesting was that I had never really noticed how much of my routine was built around that one device until I could no longer use it.

There were so many small things I wanted to do that I simply could not. I could not open my code editor and continue working on whatever I was building. I could not run a program, work on my projects, or solve a LeetCode problem (I did solve one on my phone, but it obviously did not feel the same). I could not open my usual development environment or spend an hour going down some random technical rabbit hole. But it was not just about programming

I could not watch a film or a match the way I normally would. I could not open some random website and spend an hour reading about something I had suddenly become interested in. I could not browse through YouTube, try out some new software, look something up, or fall into one of those completely unplanned rabbit holes that somehow consume an entire evening.

Even the things I could technically do on my phone felt different. After months, I ended up using Tor on my phone again. It was a small thing, but it felt strangely nostalgic. I had forgotten what it was like to do certain things without my usual setup.

The worst part was probably the feeling that the holiday was being wasted.

I had a whole day where I could have done something productive or something I genuinely enjoyed, but the device I normally use for both was sitting somewhere inside a locked college lab. I kept thinking about all the things I would normally be doing at that exact moment if I had my laptop with me.

In computer science, we often think about failures. If a system depends completely on one component, that component becomes a single point of failure. If it goes down, everything depending on it goes down with it.

For those two days, my laptop was basically that. I had built a routine where one device was responsible for a large part of my work and learning.

And maybe that is not necessarily a bad thing. We build tools because they make us more capable. The problem is not having a dependency. The problem is forgetting that it is a dependency.

There is also something useful about being forced to work without the tools you normally rely on.

With no device to work on, the only thing left was the work I had been postponing — my pending lab files and assignments. The handwritten ones. The ones I kept pushing to later because there was always something more interesting to do on the laptop.

That day, those boring pending tasks suddenly became the only productive thing I could do. So I sat down and finished them.

Ironically, the most unplugged day I had spent in months was also one of the rare days when I actually cleared a significant part of my offline backlog.

I still don’t think there is anything wrong with relying heavily on technology. In my field, it is unavoidable. My laptop is one of the most important tools I have. But it is worth knowing what happens when that tool is suddenly unavailable, and having a backup plan for when it is.

Thankfully, I got my charger back the next day. Nothing important was lost, no deadline was missed, and life went back to normal.

Still, I don’t think I’ll forget those two days anytime soon. Mostly because I really, really don’t want to go through them again.