A couple of nights ago I was up at 3 AM chatting with a good friend of mine and listening to Relax Take It Easy by Mika. I was casually situated in my bed with the laptop on my, you guessed it, lap and with the reading light dimmed out. I was comfortable and carefree.

Then all of a sudden my laptop decided to crash. So it crashed and I could no longer continue my chatting or my listening to music. I was sleepy so I thought, as sleepy people think, that things will be alright in the morning.

But they weren’t. My laptop really meant it, it crashed and I felt unloved like I had been weaned by force. I went to work only to leave four hours later to be with my sick mate, and I tried to nurse it back to health to no avail. Eventually, I gave in, ignored my pride in my outdated computer fixing skills, and took it to the repair shop.

The fixer guy at the repair shop told me he could not retrieve any information saved on my C drive, and I didn’t mind. With a personal history of enduring cyber stalkers and multitudes of viruses and trojans and p2p catastrophes, I had grown computer skin so thick not even Google can penetrate.

But here’s the cosmic iroy. I never, ever, save anything on C. I’ve seen too many PCs crash and burn to trust the accursed drive with my precious digital belongings. The only thing I saved on C was a file I had been working on for three months now. I had placed it on the desktop to motivate myself to work on it by way of constant visual exposure (Yes, I turn tricks on myself and they work). I remember the omnious moment when I put it there, I was too lazy to create it somewhere else and only place a shortcut on the desktop. How could I have known what will happen?

Now that you know the background story, know the purpose of this post. I want to express my anger at the people who constantly ask “Why didn’t you back it up?”

Imagine this: I am so sad and shocked I almost have tears in my eyes, and I come to you to tell you what happened to my three-months’ worth of work. I tell you I can’t believe this has happened, I tell you I am devastated by the loss of time and effort, I tell you I never even saved anything on C but saved this file there in a moment of innocent laziness, I tell you I have to start over from scratch and I am uncertain if I will meet the deadline…

And what do you say?

“Why didn’t you back it up?”

I respond, I don’t know, it’s the only thing I didn’t back up. And you say “That’s stupid.” I start fantasizing about hurting you, to be honest, and I get creative at it too.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 25th, 2007 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.