I stayed up very late Monday night configuring my brand-new Dell laptop. I was working in the living room, which happens to be where Laura and I plug our cell phones in to charge at night.

It was around two in the morning, that liquid hour when the night begins to turn unreal, that I closed down the laptop and stepped toward the bathroom. I'm not sure what it was that drew my eye to my cellphone, sitting in its accustomed spot on the edge of one of the bookshelves, but there seemed to be a message displayed on the tiny screen.

I picked up the phone. It read:

I'm not sure what happened that kicked the phone into that mode, but I'm always at my most superstitious in the wee hours of the morning. I spent the next eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds at the computer, scouring the Web until I could convince myself that my phone was merely telling me that it had been turned on for eleven hours and fifty-five minutes, not that I had only eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds left to live.

I'm fine, obviously. It's easy to laugh at my paranoia now, but it's never so easy in the wee hours of the morning.