Oh the Humanity

The impossible has happened, today. Like George W Bush winning not one but two presidential elections, and Steve Erwin actually meeting his death while filming deadly animals. OUR MAC LAPTOP HAS CRASHED. Crashed? you say, Impossible! Au contraire. The hard drive is dead, Dead DEAD! This is exactly the kind of nightmare that makes every poor crazy dissertation-writing fool sicken at just imagining. What have I lost? I shrink to think of it. Our entire collection of CDs, (we thought it was such a clever move, to put them all on the laptop so we didn't have to pack them across the ocean) - and 430 American radio podcasts, my link the homeland, that I listen to every night. PHOTOS yes PHOTOS of the entire past year. All my editing of my interviews with Grandpa, having undergone hours and hours and hours of work. Gone, all gone! Why didn't you have backups, you fools?!! you ask, and we, sniff sniff, have no reply. Maybe somewhere deep, deep in our subconscious it was exciting to have the prospect of catastrophe. Or maybe we were just lazy and complacent. Our Mac will never crash! We declared the with assuredness with which they declared the Titanic would never -no, never ever ever - sink!

but. Marc's dissertation is safely submitted and all is well. AND strangely two days ago I had a small moment, realizing what would happen to my life if my computer crashed and I didn't have a backup of my dissertation. So I backed that up, and some old photos. Small miracle. But that's all I saved. And that's tragic.

It's our DVD rental company's fauly anyway. They put these stupid stickers on their DVDs, one of which came loose in the computer last night and caused the DVD to become lodged for a day, then it finally came out this afternoon, but not without great noise, and some shaking of the laptop and inserting of cardboard into the CD slot. That could have been a bad idea, I now realize. Ohhh the humanity!

So here we sit at a couple communal computers at the university library, having spent hours going through Apple's troubleshooting website. We went through all the suggestions, trying every possible faint glimmer of hope. Then we finally arrived at a page that broke the news to us gently, "in the very rare case that you receive this message: your life is over and you have lost absolutely everything you hold dear." Okay maybe it didn't say it just like that, but you get the idea.
OH! Oh! ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

4 comments:

dfoster said...

That's soo sad. I hope you're able to recover something.

You know, the wave of the future is in cloud computing now. Storing files online with things like google and flickr.

Chris said...

I feel for you. The same thing happened to me earlier this year, and I about died because I'd just written a story that (having lost it) I was convinced was inspired genius. I tried everything to retrieve it from the destroyed hard drive. Finally, I was able to get it, and it wasn't nearly as good as I'd believed it was.

Anyway, the program I used was "Recover My Files." Of course I have a PC, so I don't know if it works for a MAC, but I was able to recover about 75% of what I'd lost. And all the tech support people said there was no way to get it back (so glad they were wrong). Maybe it will work for you.

If I can find it, I'll email you the install file.

Ryan (Ranger) said...

Man, that really sucks! breaks my heart. is your computer covered under warranty or something? do you have the apple care plan? are our skype days over?

aaarrggghhh!
maybe you stuff/computer isn't all lost yet. but maybe it could cost, i dunno.

KT and Lance said...

I am sick to my stomach for you. I didn't think a Mac could crash. I feel for ya, do ya need Lou and I to bring you some music?

kt