Techno-Fail

June was a month of epic failure for me. The spontaneous, ironic, computer kind of failure. More than once I imagined smacking a few people over the head with my dead net-book.

Darn thing didn't even live long enough for me to give it a stupid name, reflect on the stupidity, then rename it.

The story begins, shockingly, at the beginning of June, when my fancy flash drive pretended to become corrupt and useless, right before I was to backup my revisions on the new net-book. Almost suffered a breakdown over the numerous PDF's and writing articles I'd just saved to it while at work becoming wasted time in front of a computer screen.

And the prices of data recovery people were quoting me...I made many incomprehensible noises over multiple phone calls because “Excuse me?” was just too logical for me. I never received a reaction, so it must be a typical response.

When time had passed and a payday arrived I resigned to buy a new flash drive, and get a Geek Squad quote on recovery for the older one (for giggles I guess). She plugged it in and I discover everything returned and working like normal. No identifiable reasons for the missing files or drive I couldn't save on. Like “Hah! I'm not broken at all. Joke's on you, moron!”

I've swapped it out for the replacement I'd purchased, leaving it sitting on my desk ignored. Joke's on you now, flash drive.

And then I power up my net-book to a ruined hard drive holding a fair amount of revision captive.

Techno-karma, I'm sure.

Now I sit with a useless net-book and files I can't access to back up like good workers do unless I front a massive sum of money for a professional to save it. Once the rescue mission is complete, I'd have to buy a hard drive for the net-book. The data recovery process alone would cost more than what I paid for the net-book to begin with.

The company, naturally, doesn't do data recovery or cover the price of it despite their product started out faulty. They will, however, talk you through a system restore – no charge.

I've settled myself on the worst case scenario, and counted the work lost with hopes I can retrieve some of those words from my fragmented brain while I continue this 3rd revision. If there was a message in this it would be back up your work, and then back up your work again somewhere else (Because no one ever harps about this, right.), but I didn't write this post to deliver that message (originally, it was to be a negative but accurate review of the particular company and model of faulty product they're not claiming is such but changed my mind). Frankly, intention to back up does no good if your system chokes before you get a chance.

I seriously had not figured the thing would falter before it reached two months of ownership, or that data recovery would be so pricey.

Live and learn. And consume lots of chocolate.