Wait, What?

I have been dealing with computer-related problems for over a week now. It has been across several computers, but the worst was when it happened to my personal computer. I am well-versed in computers and computer repair, and yet, every step I had taken to fix it dug me deeper and deeper into the grave.

I reached the point where I had lost all hope of restoring my system or recovering any of my files. I was at the point where I was trying to find a workaround to get enough access to my computer to wipe it out and start over from scratch (which ended up being a day-long ordeal on its own).

Somehow, the disc I put in to wipe out the computer also failed to work properly, but in doing so, it caused my computer to flip out and debug everything that went wrong, and my computer booted up like nothing bad had happened to it in the first place.

I was left sort of staring blankly, poking at it, slack-jawed in disbelief. It was a moment of "wait, what?" Everything just fixed itself so perfectly that I can't believe it just happened. In fact, if I was reading a piece of fiction where this kind of thing happened, I would say that the ending was also unbelievable. It would be a deus ex machina that sounds like the author just ran out of ideas or had a deadline and couldn't think of a better ending.

Sometimes life is unrealistic. Things come to an end and are not always elegant or smooth. Sometimes the pacing is all out of whack and there is an obscenely long build up and then everything all happens and resolves in minutes or seconds. And sometimes the ending itself is laughably contrived, despite the fact that it was all real.

Sometimes I believe that we should avoid trying to replicate the parts of reality that make for bad stories. If you just experienced something that left you saying, "wait, what", then your audience will be left thinking the same thing. In those cases, you have to be a better creator of stories than reality.