When One Computer Dies

With apologies to the adorable Dave White for scarping the title of his debut novel, I am here again with a very sad story (sniff) about my poor pitiful existence and the trials and tribulations of living one's life in an electronic world ... as I'm sure the title of this post implies, my computer - the sweet little practically brand-new, bought directly from the Dell scratch-n-dent shop laptop, a refurb with NO bugs or problems - died.

Apparently, I did something stupid.

And the consequences were, of course, dire.

The first thing it meant was that I lost two months' worth of emails. So if you've emailed me in the past two months, chances are you have gone off into the cyberspace void that my C-drive became before we restored it to the factory defaults. Sigh. Write me again, because it's not that I don't love you. Really.

The second - and quite the more dangerous and potentially catastrophic - problem was that all my recent files were on this thing. You know, like, oh, I don't know, the MANUSCRIPT for the latest book (upon which I worked very hard and which was quite darn good if I say so myself)...

Not to mention two very important Excel spreadsheets, one of which contains the family budget, a very complex workbook I'm not too keen on having to recreate.

Oy.

But don't fear, gentle reader ... yes, there is a bright side, a happy ending to this tale of woe.

Enter the Geek Squad.

I love these people. They have the glorious ability to figure out exactly what stupid thing I did, enlighten me lest it happen again, and assure me that I'm not the only stupid person in the world who has ever done this. That, and they were able to hook my hard drive up to some brilliant contraption that actually recovered my files. All of them. Manuscript, spreadsheet, pictures, music, the hot off the cutting room floor video I created in Windows Movie Maker ... everything.

Except the emails. Those are history. Gone. Vanished. Kaput. Pfft. Sorry.

I'm learning more lessons here. First, backup everything. I know, I know - most of you very smart people do this already. Spare me. I wasn't quite to that stage yet. But I'm getting there now.

Second, I'm deleting emails as soon as I'm finished with them. If there's some important piece of information I need to keep for posterity, I'm saving it to another file (and then backing that up, right?). Otherwise, it's outta here. No more clutter and nonsense to ... well, lose, if I happen to do that stupid thing again in future.

Ah, me.

I'm slowly but surely making my way back to the surface of the vast ocean of insanity in which I've been drowning the past few months, so bear with me while I learn to breathe properly again. I've a to-do list a mile long, and somewhere on it there are lots of good things that will make us all happy again ...

In the meantime, read a book. It's good for you.

=) JB

"It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought."
-- Agnes Repplier (1858-1950) American writer