Robbed in my own house

Something was taken from house the other day, something I will truly miss.  I feel it as a mind numbing loss, and it seems I’m living at the scene of a burglary.

I lost the last month of work from my computer.  And it was a true criminal that stole it, one as real as a bloke who knocks in a window and steals my TV.  It was someone who designed and sent a vicious computer virus.

I’d never seen a virus like it before.  It attacked suddenly and without mercy.  Everything crashed and disappeared, replaced with a black screen.  And in the aftermath of the assault, the only message on my screen was an official looking one telling me I had to run a system restore program.

However, it said I only had a test version of the program.  Just click here, fill in your credit card number, the program will be uploaded and your computer will be fixed….

As I said, a criminal attack.  The computer had to be stripped back to its most basic factory settings to kill off the virus. 

In the hours I have spent reloading programs onto my computer, I have thought about all these consumer goods that I would not miss.  Take the juicer, one of our two coffee machines or two DVD players, just give me back my damn work.

It’s a prickly lesson that in world of expensive household toys, there are things without physical substance that are a lot more precious.  What I lost has no physical substance; it was digital information stored on something that is the size of my fingernail.

It is the products of the mind that are truly irreplaceable.

No.  There is something else that is honestly and truthfully irreplaceable.  These are the things that house fire victims always regret losing - the photos and videos of our families.  These things are the memories of the mind, made real.

I seethed, sulked and wailed over the loss of my work, but felt enormous relief that I had not lost the photos and videos of my first-born child.  Work I can do again.  I cannot record Guy at his first birthday party ever again, nor at his first Christmas.

I still have the digital photos and movies because I did a serious back up a month ago.  All the photos and videos of Guy were on the portable hard drive.

Once again, adversity and loss reveals what is really precious. 

Still, what I had lost was precious.  I laboured long and hard at it, and it was the product of many late nights of deep thinking. 

I lost all of the research I had done for my work, for my blogs.  Yet I can do both again.  I know where to find the research articles, and I can remember what I had written.

It will take me days to do it all again, so what was really stolen from me was time.  I was not robbed of the stuff that will feed the memories in years to come.

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