In Other Words

Wierd Weekend

So this last weekend was probably the weirdest in a while. Or rather, it was one that left me feeling pretty darned weird. Truth be told 12 hours of sleep might have something to do with that. (Initially the intention was only one hour, but then we didn’t wake up). I should know myself better by now, but I don’t. That’s not all that bad, however, as that at least leaves some mystery in life.

It all went to Sheet on Saturday morning, when I came downstairs to play my newly bought Doom 3 game (I would be a computer geek, but I don’t have enough time). I arrived downstairs to find my father in front of my computer screen. I asked him if he had managed to screw it all up for me and my dad said yes.

Now normally I expect a ‘no’ answer to the screw up answer. Especially from my father, seeing as his sense of humour doesn’t run that way. So I asked what was wrong and it turns out that he had decided that it would be a good idea to move around hard disk space from one partition to another, without backing anything up.

It was all ok though, as it was just a partition I hardly used and didn’t have anything of real importance on it. At this moment a cold dread was slowly crawling up my back (using my spinal column as a ladder) and I asked which partition. He then told me and I said ‘are you sure that isn’t the one with my unfinished book on it’ (admittedly this isn’t exactly how it went, but I’m using my dramatic licence).

So I went looking through the partitions that were still left, hoping that it was one of them, but my hopes soon sank. Finally I opened up a partition and in big letters it said ‘book’ I’m like ‘phew, its still here.’ To which he had to say ‘well, that’s the partition that I screwed up’. I’m not exactly sure what I did then, I might have schreeched, I might have sunk into a chair, I might have wailed and lamented to the gods, I might just have chased my father down with an axe. What I do remember is realising that 120 A4 pages of fictional prose (largely edited by myself) had been turned into 120 A4 pages of gibrish and meaningless symbols.

Not, mind you, that that would have made a noticable difference to most readers, but it made a hell of a difference to me. Liana did have some of the chapters, but they turned out to be early drafts and unedited. I imagine I lost approximately three of the six months of work that I did on that book. True, I admit that I hadn’t worked on it in a bit over six months, but the question of whether I would have started up again on it has now turned moot.

Then (it gets worse), in an attempt to fix the situation my dad launched a program called ‘fix it’ which could theoretically bring the entire file back. Unfortunately the chances of this were tiny and it occupied my computer for the rest of the weekend, so I couldn’t even dive into the virtual world of Doom 3 and kill hell creatures with big guns, so as to vent some of my frustrations. (This morning, when I left the house, the program was still busy, not having done anything noticeable, except for eat up 100% of the processor speed the entire weekend. The program actually maintained that it had successfully completed about 10% of ‘scanning the directory structure’ for this entire time).

So all of this left me naturally flustered and bothered (read extremely annoyed and irritable), which then contributed to me being in a very odd mood that left me arguing with Liana, talking continuously (worse than usual) and sleeping at 7:30 on a Sunday, drunk as a doorbell.

Interesting fact: In the early 20th century a patent clerk in Germany closed his patent office, saying that everything worth inventing had already been invented, so there was no longer any use for him to continue in the job of patent clerk. (I think this bloke was actually quite famous, but I can’t remember who it was, nor can I be bothered to look it up).

Interesting fact 2: This is my 100th entry

posted by Symbol @ 16.8.04