What do you think is the absolute worst thing that could
happen to a writer?
Hint: look at the title of this post.
That’s right. Last Thursday, the worst of the worst happened
to me. It wasn’t a complete crash, and I (thankfully) didn’t get a blue screen
of death, but it did require me to restart my laptop back to when I first got
it. I’m not even sure what happened exactly. When I turned it on, it wouldn’t
connect to the internet. The wi-fi seemed broken somehow, although every other
device in the house was connecting okay. The laptop just kept flashing “Can’t
detect signal” (or something like that). The troubleshooting feature kept telling
me to search for a new signal, except it wouldn’t do it. Oh, and here’s the
kicker: Windows Help wouldn’t work at all either.
When help wouldn’t work, I got nervous since that really
shouldn’t happen. So I used the restore feature on my computer. Except that
didn’t do a thing! I was finally able to connect to the internet with an Ethernet
cable, but Windows was still having trouble loading (big shocker). In the end,
I had to…oh, it’s too hard to say! I mean write!…wipe the whole thing. Back to October
2011.
I lost a ton of
stuff. My WIPs are all right of course. I have those backed up in like three
different ways (as you should, too). But I did lose a lot of old stories that
weren’t any good, but I liked to have for sentimental reasons (the short story
I wrote for creative writing when I was a senior in high school!). Plus I lost
my idea file, which had a bunch of random thoughts that I tried (and failed) to
make into stories but maybe could have used in some way, probably not but
still, I might have thought of something. I’m not too upset about that, but it’s
still kind of a bummer.
The only thing I lost that I’m really kicking myself for not
having a backup of is my file of Spam messages. There was about sixty of those
that are lost in cyber oblivion, and I’m stuck without anything to post on the Spamfiles. So that sucks.
If you want to help me in my hour of need and can’t afford
to buy me a new laptop, forward me some amusing spam messages you’ve gotten (click that link or the one in my profile!).
Surely that’s not too much to ask!
And for your own sakes, back up your hard drives.
I’m going to go eat a gallon of ice cream.
