Pay no attention to the Idiot Please!

Folks, I think it's safe to say that we've all done things that we're not proud of. I know I have, and if you're honest with yourself, so have you. It's pretty much unavoidable, at least if you've lived on this world for more than 24 hours. It's one thing to make mistakes, because we all make them. It's quite another thing to just be a complete idiot. What follows is the story of how I got to be a complete idiot.

I work in the IT field, and for those of you who don't know what IT means, it stands for Information Technology. Yeah, I'm one of those guys, the dudes with white shirts and glasses that perform miracles that make your computers magically work again. I have been working in this field most of my adult life, which means 20 plus years now. I know what I'm doing, in other words, at least most of the time.

Many of you who work in offices or even in the field with computers are constantly told to back up your data if you ever want to see it again, because you never know when your hard drive will die and you'll lose all your stuff. I know pretty much all of you have heard this from your friendly IT guy. I've told people over and over again to back up their data, and I'm a firm believer in copying all your important files to a network drive, or another server, or what ever in order to make sure that it will be there if your hard drive dies.

On December 26, my hard drive died. On my personal computer at home. As a seasoned IT professional, I should have been able to calmly pull out my back up disks, and reload my computer in virtually no time at all. Right?

Wrong.

Your friendly IT professional did not practice what he preached. In other words, I have no backup from my old hard drive, and I have spent every spare moment for the last 3 days reloading my computer from scratch. All the pics, all the music files, all the everything I had is gone forever.

I've gone through literal computer hell trying to find and tweak drivers, download software that I need to do what I want to do, and just in general have been miserable.

I've taken my medicine! I will back up from now on! I swear!

(At least if I can find the time!)