Hooray For Learning

Every day you learn something.  Yesterday I learned three things. Today I’m ahead of the curve, at least when it comes to learning. In other areas I’m a little behind, areas like writing.

But hooray for learning.

The first thing I learned yesterday was more of a repeat course. Yesterday I learned an extension course in application for something I’m constantly learning called “patience.” Yesterday’s patience training was in computer system updates. They are both necessary and vital evils.  They aren’t necessarily necessary or vital to the system itself, but they are vitally necessary for getting things done. See, an un-updated computer is a belligerent computer: every hour you don’t complete that all-important update, is an hour your computer will remind you incessantly that the said all-important update is all-important and that means it must be installed soon lest your computer fall into a void of incomprehensible data.

Void of incomprehensible data you say?  See Fire Swamps say I, same thing.

My laptop has been screaming “Fire Swamps” all week. This weekend I decided to take a little time to get things done. I took an extra hour to update my files.  When  that was done, the computer told me it needed to reboot to make everything okie dokie. 

I agreed.  I had some story files open so I shut them down to do the reboot.  Microsoft Word asked me if I wanted to save my files. I, of course, said “yes.” And this is where lesson two comes into play.  See, I’m a bit meticulous when it comes to story files.  I try to save my files daily, and I change the title to reflect the date, that way if I delete something one day, but I realize I want it the next day, a copy still exists. 

I remember this when Word asks if I want to save my story as the file name that it’s already saved under.  I say “No.”  So Microsoft obeys my command. It doesn’t save the file under the old title. It closes Word and doesn’t save the file at all.

Deleting a week’s worth of work is an amazing thing. It takes only moments to realize the horror you’ve unleashed and at least two hours of attempted retrieval before comprehension settles that it’s gone forever. 

When Word didn’t save the file and the window disappeared, the Pirate Queen was in the bathtub floating her boat. No really.  She’s got a really nice plastic pirate ship complete with wooden plank walkers and everything….

 She’d already been in there for a while.  As realization moved from my brain to my mouth in a flow of really classic pirate words, I heard the bathroom door creak and tap close as the latch clicked into place.  Either my salty language or my foreboding tempest threaded her pleasure cruise. Either way, she made the choice to sail around quietly.

I continued stringing together words that you won’t read in my young adult novel like they were Christmas lights; blinking off and on intermittently with every frantic keystroke. Until an hour later, I finally accepted that the hope of salvaging my week’s work was as real as Santa Clause. That’s when the weeping began.

With that flood came my third revelation.  Working at home as a writer isn’t any different than working in an office for a boss. Not only am I accountable for my work, but some days there are gonna be bad days in the workplace.

I wanna tell you that there’s a happy ending to this story, but the only way to tell happy, is if the next time this happens I press “save as” on everything before rebooting the system. 

Oh, and happy would also be if everything I recreate this week is better than what I created last week.  That would be happy too, but because I deleted it already, I will never know.