For The Love Of Words

   Alright. Here's the deal. If you, like myself, do the majority of your work in files kept stored on a USB thumb drive then you need to make sure you have multiple back ups of the important documents. You know, things like, oh I don't know, the book you've just spent four and a half months writing and the next few revising and submitting to agents. Trust me on this.
   Here's what happened. Last night I used my thumb drive, like I always do, in my laptop. When I was finished I put it away. This morning I went to work in my normal Saturday fashion. Afterward I needed to do some work, so I plugged in my thumb drive, like I always do, and waited for my files to magically appear on my screen, like they always do. Well, something appeared on my screen, but it wasn't my files. It was an error message telling me that the device malfunctioned and windows failed to recognize it.
   The sudden dryness in my mouth and hammering of my heart revealed to me the seriousness of what those seemingly innocuous words truly meant. They were wolves in sheep's clothing. They were the fox in the hen house. What they were really telling me was that my work was gone. Forever. Okay, maybe not gone. It's probably still there, floating in some crystalline chip matrix, pounding against the walls of it's prison and screaming at me to get it out. But I can't. I can't.
   I tried another computer. Something in me, some small naivete that took control for the briefest of times, told me that maybe, just maybe, it was the computer and not my precious thumb drive. With trembling fingers, I rushed to the desk top computer in the living room and plugged the drive confidently into the waiting port. I didn't get the error message. Hope welled up in me like Old Faithful. I waited. Nothing happened. Oh, I didn't get the error message. I didn't get anything. The computer didn't even bother to acknowledge that I had plugged any device into any port. I might as well have been blowing into the port. I would have received the same result. No, that's not true. If I blew into the port then perhaps I might at least remove some small amount of dust from it's interior. So it would, in point of fact, have been more useful to do that than to plug my thumb drive in. Now I am left with the option of professional data recovery for at least one hundred dollars expense. If they can get my work back, the price is worth it.
   I'm not sure if someone who doesn't write can fully appreciate the depths of the dismay that is flowing through me. Let me just say that I haven't been so upset in quite some time.It doesn't help matters to know that a five second process could have prevented this situation. So the next time my wife asks "Have you backed up recently?" I will immediately stop what I'm doing and back up my files. I don't ever want to go through this again.
   So here's my advice to you. Stop reading and go back up your files. Go. Why are you still reading this? Your files could be crashing at this very moment. Go. Back. Up.