We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties

About a month ago, I stumbled from my bed to my computer, hit the on button, and went back to the bedroom. When I came back out, the screen was still black and lifeless. I hit the on button again and wandered away to pour myself a cup of coffee. With coffee in hand, I was once again greeted with a completely black screen. I hit the button again and heard nothing. Saw nothing.

It’s almost laughable now how panic begun to settle over me at this point: I jiggled the cords and hit the button – nothing. I plugged it into a different outlet – nothing. I ripped it off the desk and carried to yet another outlet – nothing.

My computer was dead! I felt sick. (Yes, I am serious.)

I had finished the SMCS website the day before (thank goodness), but it had been months since my last backup. Pictures of my kids, all my passwords, my financial history,  hundreds of drawings and musings and . . .  and . . . everything gone.

Thankfully my wonderful husband was able to create “Frankenputer” – a hybrid of computer parts that allowed me to back-up my undamaged hard-drive.

But now my computer was reduced to nothing more than a pile of pieces.

There are three other computers in my house – my husband’s laptop and two desktops that are primarily used by my kids – but I felt lost and unhomed without a desk to call my own. I didn’t feel right putting an email client for my email on any of these machines. None of these other computers run PhotoShop or Illustrator. No programmers’s notebook or XAMPP. And what is my Twitter password? My cPanel password? My WordPress password? I had no idea.

Why had I never written this stuff down or printed out my password files? Why did I wait so long between backups? I’m supposed to be smart about this kind of stuff, but I wasn’t. I was relying on a machine to be smart for me. I had put too much faith in a fallible piece of plastic and metal.

. . .

Yet here I sit at my brand-new computer making all the same mistakes. So let’s do this together. I’m off to back-up my computer and make a hard-copy of my passwords: why don’t you join me?

Filed under: When Things Go Wrong