A sense of humor

You know ... there are those days when the only thing that gets you through is the fact that you have to laugh! Today was one of those.

I got to work this morning, planning to be back to normal. I was actually pretty excited about it! A chance to think about something other than my own stuff. I needed to work on the newsletter and get started on some of the other pieces that need to be published. Cool. In the words of Spongebob Squarepants, "I'm ready! I'm ready!"

I walked into my office, dropped the purse, kicked off my shoes, tapped on the keyboard to wake my computer up and ... there was a message on the screen that the boot disk didn't work. What? Oh, you're kidding me. I pressed a key and the message repeated. Alright, I've been around computers long enough, I can handle this. I did a hard restart on the computer and the message came back. Yikes! I called Max (because I wasn't calling the IT guys if I could avoid sounding stupid). He told me there might be a problem with my hard drive. I needed to call the IT guys.

Alright, so I made the call and began working on some of the things I needed to get into the mail - thank you cards, etc. Aaron came in and again... I've been around computers and computer technicians long enough that I knew enough to walk away and let the poor guy figure out what was happening.

Pretty soon he came to find me. "I'm going to have to take this back to the office. The hard drive is dead." {shoulders slump, smile turns upside down, a slight sag to the head}. And I watched helplessly as he walked out with my computer in his arms.

Now, for anyone else in the office, it wouldn't have been such a crisis. All of their data is on the main server. But, somehow mine had never gotten connected to the server and all of my data is on my computer. And, since I run heavy graphics software, my computer has a large amount of RAM and can hold that graphics software. Argh ... I can't do any work. There is no other computer in the office that I can install the software on and I can't access my own stuff from another computer. What malice has been wrought in my life?

I tried not to twitch and foam at the mouth. People came in to chat with me, offer comfort on my loss (of Dad, not the computer) and I tried to keep busy. I had a conversation with the business director about the layout of the new Creative Suite offices and then, I was done. I had done everything I could without access to my computer and I was going out of my mind. So, I left about 3:15 - picked Max up (it was his last day at CompUSA - the store is now officially closed) and the two of us came home to be vegetables for the evening.

I'm not hurrying in to work tomorrow morning. I'm going to do our laundry and just be late to work. no reason to be there ... no computer to get busy on. Hopefully Aaron will show up with my baby all freshened up and ready to go again and hopefully he will have been able to recover my data. I'm PRAYING that he is smart enough to rescue the .pst file.

But, as I sat helplessly in my office this afternoon (have you begun feeling sorry for me yet? {giggle}), I realized this isn't the first time I've lost everything on a computer. My poor husband has killed my emails more than once over the years and both he and I recovered from those terrible tragedies. All of life is temporal. Time passes, information comes and goes. I can rebuild everything that I had on the computer, it's not worth my stress. But, here's praying that I don't even have to think about it!