Bad. Morning.

*WARNING: for those of you who click that “sensor text” box, the following post contains a few choice words. Considering the circumstance, I think I restrained myself well. Just FYI *

I knew it would happen. It’s bound to happen to any computer owner at some point. Although I’m not the most responsible bookkeeper, I had allowed myself a small bit of pride with the fact that I had – up until 20 minutes ago – never lost a large amount of important data. Ever. Sure, I had forgotten to save the random document and found myself cursing like a sailor when my application “unexpectedly quit”. Overall, though, my greatest loss was no larger than a single directory.

Then, this morning at the office, I click on my Document’s alias to print out that morning’s worksheet. The icon did its usual cheerful hop on my bar for a few seconds, but then stopped. It didn’t open, and a giant grey ? appeared over the folder. Whaaa? I tried again: same result. Ok, something is wrong with the alias, I thought. I’ll just go the long way: Macintosh HD/Users/kbonson/Documents….

Nothing. There was nothing in the folder.

In order to fully appreciate this, non-mac users need to understand that the Documents folder – at least for me – is the second largest domain after the Applications folder. Where the Applications directory holds nearly all my programs, the Documents directory held all work (literary, programming, and otherwise) that I had ever done since high school.

I’m not sure what I am most upset about: the loss of all my worksheets, spreadsheets, powerpoints, and games that I have made during my 7 months teaching in Japan; or the loss of 8 years of school work, which included my codes from my summer spent as a programming assistant, my data and research paper (which never did get published after the initial rejection), and epic 20+ page papers (some entirely in German from when I was actually intelligent).

Now, I’m not completely hopeless. I DID backup my Documents folder. Once. On a DVD that is now lying somewhere, with the dust-bunnies, in my basement room back in Vermont. Yeah.

On the plus side: I haven’t cried, screamed, or thrown my computer out the window. On the other hand, the only thing that’s keeping me from doing so is the fact that I’m sitting in the middle of a teacher’s lounge which is always so politely quiet I feel disruptive when I sneeze.

How did this happen? I have no fucking idea. I made the worksheet last night. Saved it in Documents/Japan/SanNensei. Everything was as it should be. I shut down my computer (properly) and went to bed. This morning, I start up my computer at my desk – no error messages, nothing – and click on the alias…you know the rest.

And for all you “it’s a mac stupid!” people out there, hear this: in all the macs that I have ever owned and used, 90% of data loss such as this was user error. I had a memory leak near the end of my iMac’s life and it turned out to be a user error there, too. I’m sure I did something stupid at some point, that set me up for this (Karma would say it’s the fact that I didn’t back up my data well in the first place). At least it happened cleanly and without an assault of “helpful” messages spamming my screen so much the computer lags itself. I’m also running on a partitioned system and use Parallels frequently. Considering I deliberately made my computer schizophrenic and often run a program that calls for it to think with both minds at that same time, I’m truly surprised I haven’t made a mess of things sooner.

Goddamnitalltohell