Despair

A terrible thing happened today. I lost my flash memory drive ... it apparently fell off my key chain.

Normally, this would be simply an annoyance -- after all, what fool doesn't back up his files every so often? Sure, I would have lost a few weeks of work, but I would have survived.

The reason this is so catastrophic is that I just changed the hard drive on my computer, and got it back yesterday. Before taking it in, of course, I burned many of my files to CD ... but many, many of them I backed up on my thumb drive, intending to re-save them today.

So, basically, in the tiny window of vulnerability, I lost BOTH the data on my hard drive AND my thumb drive. Some of it I will be able to reconstruct from paper files and old data on my work computer, but much of it is lost forever.

And THAT, my friends, is why I despair. If Santa wants to bring me a gift this year, he'll bring me my old drive back.