Crash! There goes my career

A strange thing happened yesterday, something near tragic. I went to a meeting and before I left I locked my computer using the old contol - alt command. Coming back from the meeting, I went into my office, which no more than a modified broom closet, and heard the sound of my electric razor eminating from the computer. Not a good thing. After attempting to revive the computer a half dozen times, I finally caved in and called the HELP desk, which is located somewhere many hundereds of miles away in beautiful Alabama. (It has been referred to more than once as the HEP desk) Well, they said they would send someone right over. That was about noon. Around two pm I called and they said they would text message the tech.

I was plunged into silence. There is a noise in life that I had never noticed before. It is the noise of having a computer constantly running all day. It is not the audible noise that I refer too...it is the mental noise of having this luminous screen displaying its plethora of messages, whether it be email, spreadsheets, powerpoint slides, streaming audio for WELY.com (my favorite radio station from the northwoods of Minnesota, and once owned by the late Charles Kuralt) In the absense of the computer (which was still there, just broken) I was forced to confront the messy desk I had long put off cleaning. So in silence I sorted through a year or two of various budget data runs, printed emails, employees notices and the like. After an hour or two of sorting and disposing, I started to like not having a computer. An employee stopped by and asked why I had skipped our one pm meeting. I just shrugged my shoulders and pointed to my lifeless desktop and said, "I am offline. I had no idea we had a meeting" I soon realized it was the best excuses since the dog eating the homework. No one expects much from a guy whose computer is down.

At four pm I went home. Still no techie.

At seven thirty the next morning I called the HEP desk, and again, a promise to send a techie. About a half hour later a fellow showed up and took my computer away. I whiled away the morning reading the results of the workplace culture survey and some strategic budgeting guidance that I had meant to read much earlier but was always too busy to peruse. Around noon the techie came back and told me the hard drive was toast and that none of the data was recoverable.

It sunk in immediately. On that hard drive was the essence of my career. Resumes, letters, spreadsheets, presentations, budget forecasts, just about everything. Any email attachment I had received for the last seven years was gone. In addition there were several thousand emails, most of them mundane, but quite a few of them very special from folks who have since died. And of course there was the family photos that I often times kept at work, as well as all sorts of odd stuff, like mp3 and such. All gone. Initially there was remorse, regrets, and some anxiety about the loss of so much knowledge. Then there was resignation. I have always known that some day I will lose all of my stuff, or eventually my stuff will lose me, to be deleted, sold at auction, donated to a charity rummage sale or, with much of my tangible possesions, such as trophys from 15 years ago and news clips of successes forgotten by all but myself, thrown away.

So goodbye carreer, or at least a large portion of the recorded pieces and parts of my career. Time to start anew.

Comments

[Blue Clinkers]

Wow! Took me a while to find Hereunder. Guess that's what I get for being remiss. Sorry to hear about your hard drive. In all seriousness, is it worth getting a second opinion? Esp, if you explain how important the data is.