“The Fine Print”, by Michael Schrader
TEACHER! MY COMPUTER ATE IT!
(Written 14 April 1999. Published in the Neighborhood Journal. Posted 3 November 2009.)
Those with dogs (or small kids, for that matter) know the
perils of having one and only one hardcopy of anything. We tend to joke about the kids who tell the
teacher that the dog ate their homework, but if you have dogs like mine the
probability is quite high that they really did eat it! You must remember that the reason I gave up
rose gardening is that my dog (at that time I only had one) ate each and every
last rose bush. Once a week, another
bush would disappear, to be dug up and used as doggy chow until each and every
bush I had was gone.
My kids sometimes have the same effect on important
papers. Those with kids know that you
never leave any original copy of anything lying around. Period. Unless, of course you want to see your
original turned into the newest model paper airplane by your budding aerospace
engineer or the next great work of art by your budding Picasso or shredded into
unrecognizable shards by your future FBI agent.
So, like many others, I have taken great pains to protect my
valuable documents by saving them where kids or dogs cannot access them
(easily)--on a computer disk. The world
of electronics is great--I can save hundreds and hundreds of papers on a little
black (or red or gray) thingy that I can stick in my pocket. It is really quite mind-boggling, when you
think about it. And it really simplifies
column writing.
I wrote this week's column while out-of-town this past
week. Actually, I wrote it on a laptop
about Kosovo while watching a Kosovo independence rally. I then transferred it to a little black
thingy (also known as a diskette) for transportation back to my computer in
I loaded the diskette into the A drive and searched for my
file; it was there. I had the right
diskette (I have been known to bring the wrong diskette since I have this habit
of not labeling my diskette). So far, so good. I
then, as I have done thousands of times before, instructed my computer to copy
the file from the diskette to the hard drive, a rather routine request it has
filled thousands of times before. This
time, however, was different. This time
my computer told me that it was unable to do what I had asked of it, that
somehow it couldn't find the file that I wanted, that there was something wrong
with the little black thingy in drive A.
Discouraged, but still hopeful, I decided to fix the problem
using some of my nifty diagnostics programs.
I thought I had the problem solved when I got to the end of the
diagnostics and it told me it was done and to click on the "CONTINUE"
box. I followed the instructions, then,
to my utter surprise, my monitor went completely schizoid. After calming down my computer, I once again
checked the diskette directory, to see if anything had changed. Boy, had it
ever! Suddenly I had over 3 Gigabytes
(or 3000 Megabytes) on a diskette designed to hold just over one. And I still had one left to go!
Unfortunately, of those 3000 Megabytes, none of them
contained my column for the week, which had vanished into thin air! (Or cyberspace, as the case may be.) So despite the rather impressive trick of
cramming 3000 times more data on a diskette, I was rather disappointed because
I had lost the data that was the most important--this week's column! A mere 13,000 bytes of information replaced
by 3000000000 bytes of gibberish!
I guess the lesson is that we really cannot be safe with our
originals. If it's not dogs or kids or
spouses then it will be computers or the Internet or the fax machine or some
other device created to protect information from kids or dogs or spouses!
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