Perspective.

I hearby commit to not try not to bitch about all of my petty and mundane problems.

Wednesday morning started out sort of badly. Tuesday afternoon DH braved the mob at the local Comcast office to procure a snazzy new cable modem to replace the relic I've been using for years. The pretty new box initially refused to connect properly and after a few beatings remote resets grudgingly began working. And promptly failed sometime later that evening.

That same Wednesday morning in the hours between declaring the modem dead, trying to resurrect my original modem, and having prolonged hissy-fits about said modems, the bookkeeping goddess from my upgrade-in-progress client called me with Very Bad News (had I seen it on the news?) – our mutual client's warehouse had been pretty much destroyed in a fire in the wee small hours of Wednesday morning. The adjacent offices were more or less okay, but the warehouse (where all of the real work happens) and major portions of the electrical and network wiring were gone. This pretty much put an end to my fussing over a stupid modem issue.

Fortunately the main server room wasn't damaged and the equipment is now in the process of being set up in a small branch office in the Modesto area. The network guy told me the servers stank of smoke when they were started back up, and my fingers are crossed that there isn't any permanent damage done. Fortune again smiled when all of the hard copy reports were found undamaged – a huge stroke of luck for an old funky system that purged all of the detail data after posting. No electronic audit trails here, folks. Move along now…

There are regular warnings in the vast internet content about disaster preparedness but it is altogether another thing when disaster actually pulls up a chair and sits down for a spell. My stomach just turns when I think about what it must have been like for the company principals to face the smoking reality of a fire.

I'm going to be researching offline secure backups as soon as I get a bit of a break. While my work stuff is usually replicated on client sites, all of my financial stuff is sitting here in my little office and even though I have regular backups I'd lose it all if my house were destroyed.

Food for thought. What if the worst did indeed happen?

It is one thing to decide what valuables to grab as you fly out the door, but an entirely different thing when it comes to the electronic detritus and miscellany that we take for granted.

Speaking for myself, I'd be… well, not devastated, but definitely peeved if I were to lose all of the knitting patterns I've collected over the years. Lots of those patterns only exist in electronic form. Assuming the worst, I'd lose thousands of stitch patterns alone in my collection of books!

I'm not saying I'm going to chain myself to my scanner for the next month or so – but still… all of the "stuff" in my "knitting' directory will go along for the ride when I set up an offline backup, along with all of the treasured family photos, videos, and recordings of Rachel's music. They're irreplaceable.

PS - evidently my linking skills are pretty sad - I've (hopefully) fixed the link to Ray's Baccalaurate performance.