Galapagos Backup

I told Nina, my 11-year-old, how important it is to backup your work. She put hours and hours into her Galapagos report and saved it once, to her flash drive. I could see all her paths to disaster, because I’d been down them.

Several (many) years ago I wrote a screenplay reworking Sleeping Beauty in a post-apocalyptic world. Pretty much done, it sat on my hard drive as a storm struck. Boom. Lighting. Surge. All those things somebody warned you might happen if you didn’t unplug your electronics – those things that are so foreign they couldn’t possibly, actually happen - happened to me. Lost the whole drive, project and all.

Nina agreed that I should back everything up. So I slid the desktop file to the flash. Yep. Exactly backwards. Vaporized four hours of her work. While it was nice outside. While kids rode bikes and swam. Four hours of 11-year-old homework, which is like 40 hour to you and me. Gone. Along with any tone of authority I might have had, any sense that I was helpful in anyway. Lessons, respect, confidence – erased in 21-first-century manner, leaving no rub marks, impressions or little black rolls of goo to be blown off the page with a gentle puff.

Puff.

I am such a blue-footed booby.