Thanks to my cousin Finn for today's title.

Yesterday, I was banging away on my computer at work and I tried to download a legal document from e-mail. I was going through my normal "save as" procedure when I realized that there were no files whatsoever under "My Documents."

Not a good sign. I tried other avenues on my computer to
open documents I had worked on earlier in the day, to no avail. I got messages like "Missing path", "file doesn't exist," etc. Panic seeping in, I could see by using my "explore" function that 8+ years of my electronic files were totally gone. I re-booted and the files were still gone.

I called our IT guy. He said, "Have you tried re-booting?" That's almost always his first question. He then confirmed that indeed, all my files had mysteriously vanished.

"I swear," I said, "I did not open any e-mails that said "hot naked pix of Anna K.!" (Which had the benefit of being true...nor had I opened any spam, nor had I clicked on some internet pop-up that said "delete contents of hard drive?" and when you click 'no,' it takes that as a yes.)

Our IT guy then said, "Wow, this is bad, this is really bad. All your files are gone." In case I didn't hear him the first two times, he said, "This is really, really bad." Never were less assuring words ever spoken by an IT guy. He then explained that it wasn't an internet or e-mail virus that wiped out my files. His theory is that someone in our office, either on purpose or by accident, deleted all my files. But he can't yet tell who...as I write this, he is doing some forensic work to see if it can be determined who gave the command. Side shocker: I had no idea that any of us in the office have the ability to delete another person's entire body of work.

This story has a happy ending. Our IT guy checked some things, and then told me that a back-up of our entire network had been done at 1:00pm--and it was only about 2:30, so I lost about an hour and half of work. A funny thing is, I had saved the document that I had been working on, a couple times...I am habitually cautious about saving as I go, after having been burned too many times. But saving in this case did nothing, since everything went "poof."

Anyway, never have I been so happy upon hearing that I just lost an hour and half of work...normally I would be about ready to put my fist through the wall, but yesterday, it was an hour and half vs. eight years.