My laptop erased my homework.

It doesn’t sound like a big deal, until I mention that my work was written out in pen and my laptop erased it.

I went a little crazy buying school supplies when I realized I had exactly one working pen and no highlighters. Among the writing instruments I purchased were a couple of neat looking pens (if your idea of “neat” stopped evolving at the dawn of the tribal tattoo) in such professional colours as Electric Purple and Complicated Green. The pens bring the fancy; they’re erasable. What a time to be alive!

It’s been a long time since I was last in school, and erasable pen technology has come far. Long gone are the “erasable” pens that work by sanding away your mistake along with the top layer of paper – they’ve been replaced with high-tech nubbins that gently remove all trace of your stupidity while leaving your notebook intact. It’s a magical process, using friction and voodoo to clean up the messes you leave behind. It even says so on the pen, right under the barbwire design that would not look out of place tattoo’d on the muscle-bound arm of an enormous douchebag: remove by friction.

Too bad it’s all a lie.

After a particularly grueling lesson on crap I will never use, I was horrified to discover almost half my brilliant work had been erased. It was as though someone had taken one of these fancy witchcraft friction pens to it, removing a good chunk of the DACUM chart I had literally slaved over for hours. How could this have happened?! There was no friction here; I was as unchafed as a maiden from the old country. Where did my writen work go?!

It was then that I realized that friction is little more than heat; a manual way of producing the same heat currently wafting out of my trusty Macbook. The laptop was on and had been set aside on top of my binder, on the very page that I had writen an excellent start to my most loathed project. This heat had simulated the same provided by friction, and the end result was my work disappearing before my eyes. TRICKERY! The devil himself had risen from the underworld to tamper with my dissertation on CRM!

I was pissed. I hate this class, and I don’t want to redo my work. The erasable pen is a good idea, but if something as harmless as a little heat can obliterate your work, a warning might be nice. Do they need a good technical writer? I know where they can find one cheap.

Fucking pen. Looks like I’ll be doing homework – on the computer – all weekend long.

Jerks.