Disaster: 1 Motivation: 0

A week ago, the night before I was to leave for a conference and be out of town for four days, the night I was planning to put the finishing touches on my conference presentation, my computer experienced a kernel failure.  In non-technical terms, it died and could not be resuscitated.

Hence I have been offline for most of a week.  Yesterday I got a new laptop and am slowly rebuilding my library of applications, renewing all my passwords, re-discovering bookmarks, and so on.  In one sense, the disaster was a blessing: it took the decision of what to do at the conference out of my hands. I sent the panel organizer a message apologizing as deeply as I could from the depths of my panic and explaining that I had nothing to present.  Nothing.  I do have some stuff saved in the cloud, but with no computer available on which to work with it, no hope of getting a presentation done in time.  This will long remain a low point in my career.  I am well aware that “my computer died” is a lame undergrad excuse, and there’s no reason it should ever happen to a professional who takes proper precautions.  My computer failure brought me face to face with the extreme cost of practicing frugality: in the past I’ve had multiple backups because work provided me with a second computer (a benefit which ended last summer), I purchased online backup subscriptions (the most recent one stopped working for complicated reasons and so has not been updating frequently), and I set up regular backups to external hard drives (something I kept meaning to do as soon as I had an extra $100 or so to spend on a few more terabytes of storage… which of course I never did).  My efforts to make my 7-year old laptop limp along until I got a new job proved devastating.  Purchasing a new laptop last year or the year before would have been well worth the expense if it saved me this last-minute tragedy.  I’m all in favor of frugality but it must be balanced with an accurate evaluation of risks.  My evaluation failed in this case.

I did not want to travel to the conference but reluctantly agreed with PILW that since not going would be as expensive as going, we might as well get on the plane.  Imagine our surprise when, descending into the city, the pilot said “Local weather is 75º and sunny”.  Really?  Really.  It was the most perfect spring weather all weekend.  We ran 8-10 miles a day and walked a lot, all over the city, up and down hills.  It was a lovely respite.

Now that I’m back, however, panic and depression have set in once more.  My old laptop is in a 3-5 day queue for data recovery services, which are likely to become expensive.  Out of pure need I purchased a new laptop, an expense I can ill afford at the moment; but it had to happen sooner or later.  I pray that my cash flow won’t be interrupted to the extent that the purchase proves to be a huge problem.  A laptop is approximately a month of living expenses, and my cushion wasn’t big to begin with, so…  not too happy about the desperation purchase.   I hope it will last a long time–though obviously I’ve learned my lesson and will replace it well before the 7 year mark.  And I also got two external hard drives at the same time, so regular backups as well as cloud syncing are in the works.

The computer disaster has entirely sapped my motivation.  Some of the things that were not recently backed up include the different versions of my resumé, my job searching links, and the Scrivener project with all my cover letters, application notes, status labels of each application, and so on.  I am avoiding the very thought of recreating it all.  I’m simply…  ugh.  It gives me a sick feeling in my belly.  Eventually I will drag myself together and start the process again, but right now everything feels nearly impossible.

Add to that the fact that my Dad is in the hospital again, and my ability to get things done seems to have taken a nosedive into negative digits.  Sort of like the way the temperature here is dipping below freezing tonight and there have been, I kid you not, solid white particulates drifting down from the sky today.  Ridiculous.