Burn, baby, burn

 Alternate title: Why yesterday sucked

I came into work yesterday at 7 AM and began preparing for my day. Shook my mouse to wake up the machine (we leave our PC's on overnight at my office for updates) but the monitor was still black. Hit the Esc key a few times and still nothing. I realized something was wrong when I hit the power button on the case and still nothing happened.

Not a big deal I thought, and rather than send it out for repairs I figured I could replace the power supply myself. That didn't work so ultimately we sent it out.

Two hours later I received an email, part of which read: "This entire PC is toast.  Power Supply, motherboard and hard drive are dead.  We cannot recover the data . . . there were burn marks on the drive."

I work in a heavily regulated industry so we have safeguards to backup business-critical data like consumers' social security numbers, contracts, etc. In fact all that data operated from a network drive and it wasn't affected at all. But in the 4 years I've been using that machine, I've created some extremely detailed proposals and marketing propoganda, purchased stock photography and artwork, and was in the middle of a detailed project that, in essence, guarantees me a higher paycheck.

Gone, baby, gone. Some of the information was backed up on my laptop and much of it can be retrieved from our mail server, provided I attached it to an email. But the rest of it (particularly hundreds of dollars in stock photography) is gone, and has to be re-created from already-printed materials.

On a side note, I had an interesting conversation with my 2-year-old last night:

Him: "Dada, where remote go?"

Me: "I don't know, Tyler. It's lost."

Him: "Oh, fuck." Similar reaction I had when I received the email about my computer. I wonder where he gets it from.