Chaos arrived at 8:01 A.M. on Friday the 13th.
The first message on my computer screen said "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM "
But hey, I am not superstitious. Thirteen is one of my favorite prime numbers. It was my locker number in high school. So, I did the usual things: Rebooted the computer (didn't work); Turned it off and restarted it (didn't work); then, being in the work environment of a large company, I called for Desktop Support, and went around the corner to the nearest lab to use another computer while they ran a check on my hard drive.
I did ask, "You'll save all the data on the hard drive, right?" as they carried it away to be "re-imaged." And I was assured that, yes, I would still have everything.
They brought it back at 4:00 P.M. and explained that all I had to do was run the program in the directory with my name on it, and open the ghost file to drag-n-drop old files back onto the hard drive. By the time I got into the ghost file, they were long gone. It took me several minutes of searching through unfamiliar directories in the ghost file to realize the truth: None of my files were in it. And, come to find out, the userid in the Documents and Settings directory was not mine. The ghost file was not even from my computer. Everything I had on that hard drive, including seven years worth of emails, was gone.
But hey, this was not a life-threatening earthquake, it was merely an inconvenience. Right? I said that the guy who cleaned my hard drive must have had a bad day. Then someone told me that, yeah, his wife has been battling breast cancer for four months. Sometimes we never know the problems other people are going through.
So, over the weekend I decided to buckle down and consolidate my four facebook accounts into one. Why did I have four accounts? Because I wanted one for my family, one for the people I went to high school with (over forty years ago), one for people I know from church, and the last one for my book (or books, since I now have two titles on Amazon.com). None of these groups of people knew each other, and none of them belonged in my family group, so why should I let them see posts from my family? Facebook is all about connecting everyone with everyone else. They lack an intermediate privacy tool that would allow members of my lists to see only what other members of that same list posted on my page.
How could I have set up four accounts? Well, I had to create a separate gmail account for each one. So, after I did a friend-request, inviting everyone over to my primary account, I closed the other facebook accounts. Then I thought I should probably close the gmail accounts that I had set up for the facebook accounts [insert hair-raising, threatening theatre music here]. But come to find out, my blog was automatically deleted with the gmail account.
I had no idea that blogspot.com was a subsidiary of Google/gmail. So now my blog is gone. Of course, I opened a request to have it restored, but it has been a week and I have heard nothing. So, I'm in the process of rebuilding it myself. But, of course, I cannot re-use the same gmail names, and I cannot re-use the same blog name. So now the blog is logancowartwords.blogspot.com (with no dash) instead of logancowart-words.blogspot.com. And the blog does not post to Amazon.com, or to my facebook page like it did before. I hope that someday I'll figure out how to make that work again.
There were other chaotic things that happened this last week. Milk was spilled onto our minister's computer and it died. His wife was almost killed by a falling beam. At least one person, a friend of people in the congregation, did actually die.
When I returned to work on Monday, I began the task of recovering my emails from a backup I made in December, 2009. These emails were in separate .PST files, one for each year from 2004 (the last time I lost my hard drive) to 2009. I began by trying to copy these onto my P: drive which is hosted on a server. But after about 600 megabytes, the message popped up that my P: drive was full. So, I had to call the help desk to ask for more space on my P: drive. Instead, they talked me into moving the emails into the Enterprise Vault which was in my Inbox in Outlook. This worked for about 600 megabytes (about a year and a half of emails), and then I received the message that my Outlook inbox was full, and I could no longer send or receive emails until I deleted some of them. So, I got to call the help desk again and ask for more space. But they couldn't give me more space in the Vault without getting someone's approval, so they consented to adding 3.5 gigabytes of space to my P: drive — which is what I wanted in the first place.
I think I got about three hours of actual work done this week. When chaos hits, everything falls apart.
Hopefully, things will be getting better now.
Logan
