I spend a lot of my time wired, and I have lost plenty of data in this lifetime. I’ve had laptops get stolen, fizzle out slowly after an airplane coffee mishap, and simply give up languidly after one too many trips to the humid Yucatan Peninsula.
I’ve had to rebuild my iTunes library from scratch several times because I did not have anything backed up. I’ve had to promise many a tech support rep my firstborn child (joke’s on them). I’ve seen it all, in other words. And I’ve learned from most of it. For instance, I now keep my data immaculately backed up all the time—which didn’t help me last weekend when my backup disc spontaneously unformatted itself at the precise moment I was accidentally deleting all my email data on my laptop.
In this latest episode of pure technical mayhem—which lasted for about ten days and which I just yesterday finally sorted through, more or less—one new thing became very clear to me: If I am looking for help with something close to my heart (like my Mac), there is only person who is ever going to help me, and that, unfortunately, is me.
Take last Friday. I spent two hours on the phone with a perfectly kind tech support rep at Go Daddy trying to figure out why the settings that work perfectly in Entourage won’t work in Macmail. We went through everything on her list. We both stayed very patient and communicative. We were like a couples therapist’s dream. But we did not figure out what the problem was.
However, I did. After I got off the phone with her.
Later this past weekend, I left my beloved Mac in the hands of complete strangers at the Microsoft store. Yes, the Microsoft store. They assured me that they could get my data safely and soundly from Entourage to Macmail. I eyed them skeptically as I handed over my Amex. They were confident. But they were wrong. They couldn’t do it. Three days later, they gave it back to me with a shrug. (They kept my $50, though. Good one, Microsoft!)
Anyway, guess who finally figured out how to do it? That’s right. Me. I took it home and figured it out. In an hour. Because no was simply not an answer.
Then I gloated about it:
I was talking to a fellow Virgo friend last night and he said to me, “You know what’s hard about being a Virgo? Always being right, but having to be gracious about it.” I laughed. It sometimes does feel that way.
In addition to loosely identifying as a Virgo (with the disclaimer that I really don’t believe in astrology, actually, but for what it’s worth, I am a quintessential Virgo), I also identify as a half-assed Buddhist, and never more so than in this last week, when I was faced with the demise of my entire digital world. Talk about letting go of attachment.
In the end, I saved a lot of my data, but I did lose some of it—including an email that I have kept in my inbox for the last seven years. It was the last email my grandmother ever sent me, and I had kept it because it made me feel like there was still a little bit of her left, somehow. Now, that email is gone. I am staring at Inbox Zero. I can’t help but dig for a metaphor: something about an empty inbox equals a zen mind? That’s not quite it. I’ll keep working on it. In the meantime, time to go fill that inbox back up!
