Saturday 8 September 2007

The Importance of Ctrl + S

Back up your work and press save! Go on, humour me and quickly do it to anything you have open on your desktop. Done? Phew, what a relief. Now if only I could go back a day and tell myself that…

It is not like this is a new phenomenon. I have cried over Word before, when I realised I had lost days of work. In one spectacular moment of foolery, I watched my iMac warn me time and time again that its battery was dying (the date and time kept going haywire); all the while thinking I’d back up the hard drive to disc the next day. Now, that was painful.

But have I learnt my lesson? I have a pile of blank data discs at my side, waiting for me to start the huge bother of reaching across for one (agh!), leaning down to insert it (gah!), clicking on My CD Writer (yawn!) and dragging the files across (total boredom!). So, naturally, I haven’t done this yet.

I also made the mistake of assuming I was saving my Word doc as I was editing yesterday. But apparently not… It was late afternoon and I was staring in puzzlement at a sentence that managed to pass through all the tenses in wild abandon. My eye wandered, and I saw a little envelope icon to the left of the tool bar. Hmm, whatdothatdo

I clicked, and the browser window went all weird, looking like I was about to email an open Word doc. Back away, back away! I hit close. ‘Do you want to save first?’ asked Word. ‘Certainly not!’ was my reply, I don’t want to save this weird email template!’ So I hit close, Word shut down and I lost 13 pages of edits.

Random Hysterics is not a game I shall be playing again. Word, you have been warned.

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