One click

Technology has enabled us to make bigger and better mistakes more quickly.

I use one of those little USB memory sticks for backups of works in progress. They’re great–no moving parts, so they’re less likely to corrupt on you like a floppy disk, portable, sturdy, with more storage space than the hard drive of my first PC. Vastly more. Ten times as much, at least. (I think my first PC had a 20 MB hard drive.)

As I’ve written elsewhere, I’m a morning person. I get up at 5-5:30 am and write. However, I won’t claim that I’m 100% at my best at that time of morning for all operations. Writing goes well–other things less so. This morning I must have pulled up the document from the USB stick instead of my hard drive. That’s the only way I can explain what happened. I typed in hand-edits to the first 10 pages of the short story in progress, and wrote about 600 additional words, taking the total up to something like 4200. The last thing I did before shutting the computer down was back the document up. Who pays attention to what those little warning pop-ups say when you attempt to copy one document over another? Hell, I know what it says; why should I have to read it?

Turns out, the reason is that what I did was copy yesterday’s version of the document on my hard disk over this morning’s work. If I had realized at that moment what I had done, I wouldn’t have compounded the problem by throwing out the hand-edited manuscript from yesterday. And even that wouldn’t have been a problem if today wasn’t garbage day.

By the time I realized that my USB document only had 3200 words, it was too late. The garbage guys had come and gone, and so I lost not only this morning’s new work, but my edits from last night, too. Things like this don’t happen to me often, but when they do they’re immensely frustrating. I was able to recreate the changes and new text, but I’m left with this feeling that I probably didn’t do it quite as well as I did the first time. That maybe I’m forgetting one nicely nuanced passage that I changed last night or added this morning. I’ll never know, of course, because half the changes are on the way to being converted into new paper and the other half are on their way to that great electron bit bucket in the sky.

As Winnie the Pooh might say, “Oh, bother.”