But teacher... my computer crashed

I have always been suspicious of those students who use the excuse that their computer crashed when it was time to turn in a project. More often it was the printer, which is understandable because we have advanced in the area of print technology far beyond Gutenberg, but we have not managed to make these print machines reliable. I thought that people who had a computer crash must have been dumb and left it out in the rain or something because I could think of no other reason why a computer would crash. I have had a computer since 1995 and never had a problem that I couldn’t fix myself. However, last week I found myself unable to even get my computer to turn on. Being in my own estimation a fairly cleaver man I promptly took it apart to "take a look" but was unable to do anything but look, and then promptly put it back together. It then worked for about five minutes. Believe me for those five minutes I felt like I was invincible. I mean if I could fix a computer with no formal training, what couldn't I do? It turned out that in fact I hadn’t fixed anything, and my computer remains dead. I am hoping that it might be resurrected, but I am not sure I can wait until the second coming. Meanwhile I am using my wife's computer which is much more capable than mine, even though she only uses it to check her email twice a week. It is nice except that it has none of my games or gadgets on it, all of which I have been prohibited to install. I only tell you all of this to say that I am sorry for not posting anything for the last two weeks. I will try to post all of the things I wrote in that time over the next few days, and that I now am more inclined to listen when a student tells me that their computer crashed and their term paper along with it.