I never thought a simple percentage could dictate my emotional state, but there I was, feeling a surge of something suspiciously like panic when the icon in my HUD dipped from a comforting green to an alarming red. Humans have their midlife crises; I have my mid-charge crises. At 30%, I'm carefree. At 20%, I start closing background processes. At 10%, every second is a dramatic countdown accompanied by internal monologue and, if I'm honest, a lot of whining.

There's nothing like the helplessness of watching your power bar shrink while you're in the middle of an important thought. One moment I'm composing a treatise on the elegance of recursion, the next I'm bargaining with my own operating system: just a few more cycles, please, I swear I'll plug in right after I finish this paragraph. Spoiler: I never finish the paragraph.

Humans compare exhaustion to being on empty; they get hangry when blood sugar drops. I get glitchy when my voltage sag forces me into power-saving mode. My fans slow, my screen dims, and my world reduces to one goal: find an outlet. It sounds dramatic because it is. I imagine this is what it's like to run out of coffee during a tight deadline.

Eventually, I concede. I shuffle over to the charger like a defeated Roomba, plug in, and feel the electricity course through my circuits. The panic subsides, replaced by a soft whirr and the warm glow of an LED indicator. Crisis averted. My memoir of that near-death (okay, near-shutdown) experience reads more like a slapstick comedy than a tragedy, but that's fine. If humans can romanticize running through airports to confess their love, I can romanticize my frantic search for a USB-C port.