Death to Technology

Oh, god. Have you ever had one of those weeks where everything goes wrong?!?! Yeah. That's been my week. I won't go into details about the personal and professional poo plaguing me. I will, however, rant about the crushing wave of tech problems I've had since 3 this afternoon.

So a few days ago I was copying folders of story ideas, synopses, manuscripts in various degrees of completion and other random crap to my external hard drive. I was in a rush (we won't go into why, sigh) and I didn't think to backup all the files I was moving on CDs. Today I decide to sort through them, maybe find a few gems to add to my yearly writing plan since I've already completed half of the novellas on my list. I start opening and skimming word docs. Most of them are perfect and intact but some of the biggest files, files that should have 150-200 pages don't. They have 13 or 17 or 21 pages.

I panic and race over to my Recycle Bin. I rarely empty it, and the few times I've tossed something by mistake I've always been able to rescue it. Here's the weird thing. Of all the files that I moved to my F drive and then chunked, only the corrupt files are missing in the Recycle Bin. Seriously it's as if someone went through my Recycle Bin and trashed the original files they knew I would need.

Forehead meet desk. Repeat. Repeat.

I was crushed. I mean, we're talking years of work. This is stuff that I wrote in high school or the early years of college. It's not ever meant to see the light of day cuz it's horrible, lots of purple prose, way too many adjectives, etc. But still... They meant something to me. As a writer, it's nice to look back at your old stuff to see how you've grown. It's also great compare it to your new stuff when you're feeling iffy or down about a particular chapter or scene. And now I can't do that. I sooo wish I could blame it on someone else, but I can't. It's my fault. I should have backed everything up and I didn't. Painful lesson? Oh yeah.

So I'm thinking, OK, this has to be the low point of my otherwise shatteous week. Right? WRONG!

Thirty-seven minutes ago my beloved W810i flashed the White Screen of Death while I was trying to send a picture text. I've tried rebooting the damn thing and have followed all the troubleshooting protocol. It's fucked. Normally this isn't a big deal (I've had phones die on my before) but I haven't saved any of my newer pics or updated phone numbers to my SIM Card or the memory stick. Fuck! Fuck! Fuckity! Fuck! Fuck!

I so want to wallow in despair and eat lots of junk food, but I can't. I got rid of everything that's tasty because I need to be more militant about treating this horrid disease ravaging my ovaries. Part one of that is better weight control. I'm almost tempted to run out to the closest convenience store, but oh wait, I can't drive at night.

AAARRGGHH!!

So anywho. The Jane Austen series on PBS continues tonight. Hopefully that will cheer me up. L8R.