I’ve been having trouble with my internet in the room and complained multiple times to the hotel. They sent their engineer up–who announced as he came into the room, “I’m not particularly computer savvy.” Oh, how true that was. He poked at buttons on the computer and said, “I’ll have to close these windows,” and generally pretended to do something.
I continued to have no internet and to complain vigorously. They finally agreed to move me to another room. So during all of that, I didn’t do much blogging or work on my NaNo. Today, I got up and opened my novel for the first time, since he came in, so I could do some NaNoWriMo.
It consisted of the title page.
He had deleted the novel.
I hyperventilated for a second and then realized that I back up on a regular basis. Which means that I only lost half a page. I was ready to kill though. To their credit, the hotel recognized that this was a huge deal and that, even though it all turned out all right, they had really screwed up. They gave us one night for free.
Moral of this story: Auto-backup is your friend.
Sorry about your lost novel page. I am trying to figure out how, in the process of setting up networking, he had deleted a file? This reminds me of the Dell support technician who said, after I told him my cd-rom drive was defective, to “reinstall windows.” “I’m a computer professional,” I told him. “I am 100 percent certain it is the cd-rom drive because I’ve tried it on another computer.” “Well, we can’t replace it,” he said, “unless we delete everything on you hard drive and start over.”
Short answer: Never let an untrained hand near your precious jewels. For example, I will never, ever again try to cut my own hair.
At one point he had the help file open in Open Office, which was when I suggested that he get off my computer. I think what happened with the novel was that I had highlighted it to do a wordcount and he hit keys while in there. (The wordcount was being buggy and would only count highlighted sections; that’s fixed now.)
I would love to see pictures of your untrained haircut.