Starting Over

I don't think I could feel like a bigger idiot. But I guess I got upset over something that perhaps wasn't so devastating. I was sprucing up my little computer, rearranging things so that I would have more space on my C drive. Since there's always the possibility that Microsoft will ruin my life, I backed everything up, including all of my e-mail and calendar events (both past and future).

I went through the process and everything worked out great. So the next day I started going through the stuff I had backed up and stupidly deleted the mail archives, thinking that everything was still on my computer.

1st Lesson of the Day: "Archive" means "cut and paste", not "copy".

Of course, I already knew that, but somehow I didn't clue into it until hours later, when I realized that every single e-mail and event that I had saved over the past 3 years was wiped out. I completely lost it. I know it sounds ridiculous that I should get so worked up about electronic data, but it was in this moment that I realized exactly how much I relied on this technology.

I have the worst memory. Sure, I can quote Simpsons' episodes and recall that time that Mrs. Plevins yelled at me in front of my whole Grade 5 class, but otherwise, it's hard for me to remember what I was doing last week, or last year. So I use old e-mails and the calendar in Outlook to remember for me. So it was really important to me that 3 years worth of memories was erased because I was careless. And the saddest part of all this is that I don't remember what I lost. I know most of it was correspondence between me and my friends, and there were some newsletters that I get once in a while, and there might have been some important stuff, but I had placed all of my faith in this little machine to remember things for me, that I just pushed it out of my own head, thinking it was in a safe place.

I actually had trouble sleeping that night. By the next morning, I had come to my senses and realized that all was not lost. Half of my messages were still saved on the server. In my attempt to recopy all of the messages back onto my computer, I forgot to click one little box, and now all of the messages that were on the server are now downloaded onto my computer.

2nd Lesson of the Day: "Download" means "cut and paste", not "copy".

So, the server is empty, and I have most of my recent e-mails on my computer. The majority of the stuff that I permanently lost were really old Waterloo Engmail messages from my classmates about projects and from my profs about assignments. Technically, this was all stuff I should have ditched a while ago. As for the rest of it, I'm going to have to rely on friends to fill in the gaps. I suppose I should just make this a "silver lining" experience and move on.

But I still feel like an idiot.

"I don't feel the way I ever felt, I know, I'm gonna smile and not get worried, I try but it shows"