I was reminded yesterday of how dependent we are on our technology. It’s bad enough when you can’t connect to the Internet; but it can and does get worse.
I came in to work at 0600 and my laptop wouldn’t boot up. After three calls to the help desk to send out a hardware tech (one of which revealed that, “the tech sent you an email asking if you’re available…” To which I replied, “Okay—if I can’t boot up my machine, I’m not going to be receiving email.” Right), at 0945 the guy finally showed up.
He ran a diagnostic and pronounced my hard drive dead at the scene.
Here’s where the blood drains from one’s face: all my files, my business plans, product features specs, house-moving checklists, expense reports—in short, pretty much my whole life—was on that drive. And, since my employer supplied me with neither network backup nor an external hard drive, nothing was backed up.
A lot of the material was still there, attached to emails. But the stuff I worked on this past week was gone with the electrons. I have to say, life did not seem worth living at that point.
The tech took away my machine to replace the drive, accompanied by dire predictions of the unlikelihood of recovering any of my files, and I set about trying to recall all my brilliance of the past few days. But my heart wasn’t in it.
About three hours after that, he called to say he’d been able to recover my files after all, and they’re now on the hard drive of my interim machine. And I’ve ordered external hard drives for my office mate and myself.
I swear I’m backing up every other day from here on out.
At least once a week.
I promise.
No comments:
Post a Comment