It was horrifying. My computer was being repaired, and suddenly I was the most productive person on the planet. With instant messaging, CollegeHumor, the Facebook, SomethingAwful, the Superficial, Salon, Google News and all of my other favorite destroyers of my time all suddenly ripped away from me, I didn’t know what to do. So I went to the grocery store and compared prices on different types of oranges. I read for classes. I studied for a midterm for more than 20 minutes. I cleaned my room. I paid bills. I cut funny cartoons out of old New Yorker magazines. I cooked. I did laundry. God, it was awful.

I had gobs of time and wasn’t sure what to do with it. “Is this what life was like before the Internet?” I asked myself, staring slack-jawed at MTV while doing calisthenics in my living room. And then I turned off the TV and went for a run, because I was just that bored.

The trouble began last Friday, when I did a pretty stupid thing by my standards, which by everyone else’s standards is really fantastically stupid. Before a weekend trip to Vegas, I was sitting in the Expresso Roma coffee shop on our own humble campus with the Holy Trinity — laptop, digital camera and coffee cup — stationed atop the tiny table in front of me. To maximize my digital camera’s storage capacity for blackmail-worthy photos, I was planning to wipe its memory card by transferring some old photos to my hard drive.

But first, I had to pump my coffee full of sugar, and this is where things went horribly, irrevocably wrong. Mistake #1: ordering coffee in the first place. Mistake #2: taking the lid off the coffee. Mistake #3: being an uncoordinated, bumbling idiot and managing to spray a shower of coffee all over the laptop.

It was like the moment after you hit someone with your car or come home to find your house on fire: You know something really bad has happened, but you can’t fully grasp its significance, so you just stand (or sit) there, not moving a muscle, slowly processing the situation.

Witnesses to the accident have yet to verify this, but I’m pretty sure I spent at least fifteen seconds doing just that. I stared at my newly caffeinated machine, stupefied. Finally I walked calmly to the nearest napkin holder, took out a fistful of napkins, walked back to my table and started sobbing uncontrollably. OK, so I didn’t sob — it’s not like I’d dumped the entire cup of coffee on the computer, only a little bit. I frantically dabbed at the table, the laptop screen, the keyboard, the cord for my camera and the pile of change I’d laid out onto the table for a croissant (I’m broke, OK?).

Then the keyboard began malfunctioning spectacularly, and I knew I was fucked.

And when my friendly neighborhood computer whiz was unable to fix it, I knew things would get expensive.

Thank God for credit cards: It cost a cool $129 to fix the thing. But more torturous were the five days — weekdays! — when I was without my primary mode of entertainment, communication and procrastination. Now that my coffee-scented machine is back in my hands, my productivity has gone out the window once again, but at least I’m once again able to focus on what’s truly important in life.

I’m sure you all can relate, and if you can’t, you’re either lying or you aren’t a true college student. However, I recount my tale not only so you can laugh at my expense (although isn’t it really fun?) but so we can all learn the real lesson here: Don’t drink coffee. As warm, dark and inviting as it may be, it secretly plots to destroy all of us. It wants to sap our fluids, keep us up all night when we need sleep, stain our teeth, give us corpse breath and, worst of all, destroy our electronics. The Mormons were onto something when they banned caffeine from their diets. They know something we don’t. If they take over the world, I wouldn’t be surprised.

Oh, and one last thing. With finals approaching, turn off the damn computer (or spill something on it!) and you’ll have nothing to do but study. You’ll hate your life, but think of how productive you’ll be.