Note To Self: When Letting Tech Support Take Control Of Your Computer, Know What They're Deleting

For the last few months, my MSN mail has been acting petulant. Sometimes it does what it's told. Sometimes it goes catatonic. Sometimes it just does whatever the fuck it wants. It got to the point where I just ended up using it through hotmail most of the time, simply to avoid it locking up my computer. Today, however, I decided to take power over my simple office machinery...and so I got tech support on the issue and they did that cool thing where they take over your computer and become responsible for the horizontal and the vertical while you sit at your desk wondering if they can see all the porn.

The good news was that the lovely Pearl fixed my email so that it's working great.

The bad news is that in order to do so, the lovely Pearl apparently DELETED EVERY FUCKING SAVED EMAIL I'VE SENT OR RECEIVED FOR THE LAST THREE YEARS. Pearl didn't inform me that this was going to be a byproduct of her fixing my mail, or else I would have, you know, saved it all on a zip drive or something. Something.

My hope is that this will be one of those moments where I realize my OCD storage of email is akin to realizing there's absolutely nothing you need in your garage, that it's all just a bunch of things that you inexplicably keep in boxes and shuttle from one house to the next for the total of your life. I'd like to believe this is going to be how I feel tomorrow. I'd like to believe that. Until said belief occurs, I intend to sit here like Christopher Reeve at the end of Somewhere In Time, pining away for my electronic Jane Seymour, lost forever into the ether.

Comments

[Alison Kent]

I've kept a dead hard drive on my desk for a year knowing it was unrecoverable, yet unable to let it go because I lost two partial manuscripts I didn't have anywhere else. The husband finally tossed it this week. It took me a year of not needing anything on it to realize I didn't need anything on it. Including all those saved emails that went down with the crash.

[Tex]

And you got nominated outside the mystery category, too...too bad you're up against my old pal Carolyn See. You are going to have to pleasure me big time when I'm in LA next week to make me change allegiances.

Sorry about your e-mails.

Love,

Tex

[tex]

Tod,

What the fuck, I'm a couple of days late in checking in so I'm reading three posts at once and I realize Iknow the Wichita guy in the PARADE post. Or at any rate knew him thirty-odd years ago.

Call me for details.

Holy shit.

It's a real guy.

Swear to Ghad.

Tex

[Richard]

I sent my laptop for repairs to the screen, and they replaced the hard drive, tossed the old one, and I lost thousands of photos and a couple of chapters. I was a dolt to not backup before sending it off. THEY were criminal in removing a perfectly fine hard drive.