“Has anyone seen my…” “That’s weird. I swear I put it here three days ago…” Sound familiar? Probably not, but it was a good way to up my word count. If those words did ring a bell, however, then you are someone who is all too familiar with one of the most horrifying experiences imaginable: Fear of Accidentally Deleting Something.
Whether this is done in the real world or online to your MySpace or Tinder account, there are several ways this can happen; each more terrifying than the last. It’s often the uncertainty of the situation that causes the most panic. Though some of the stories from this happening (as long as it didn’t happen to you, of course) can be quite funny, it is still a deeply troubling event. Whether you just emptied the recycling bin on your computer before looking inside or maybe something fell into your actual recycling bin at home, accidentally throwing something out can have devastating consequences. Inevitably, you don’t realize you have mistakenly rid yourself of something important until you have an important reason to use it. You can go 6 months without having to refer to your extensive collection of decorative napkins that you strategically keep on the edge of the table, hovering inches above a menacing garbage that has a grudge. But then the day that the mayor wants to come over and see your collection and give you the key to the city, the napkins are halfway to Michigan in the back of a truck surrounded by molding food, balls of lint and the credit card bill you’ve been looking for that’s now 3 weeks overdue. It happens to all of us. Even the people who pride themselves in always knowing where something is, or claim they have never lost anything, are probably missing something right now.
There’s really no worse feeling than realizing you’ve just lost something that you basically can never get back. There is still the option of rummaging through piles of garbage, desperately searching for something that even if you do find you probably don’t want to be holding for too much longer. You can do the same thing in the cyber world by going through your history of online purchases or you could do a system restore which is essentially a do-over at life. By doing so, however, you are risking possibly losing even more. All technicalities aside, once you’ve thrown something out by accident, it’s gone for good. It can be a traumatizing experience that involves 5 stages: Denial, acceptance, disbelief, denial again and, finally, breaking something.
Okay, yes, there are far scarier things out there than misplacing that video of you dancing at the party with a stuffed monkey named Alfonzo (but don’t worry the video is definitely online somewhere). But the threat of actually losing something important to you because your elbow bumped it off the desk or you accidentally deleted a folder from your desktop without looking at what was inside is a legitimate concern. My advice to you is back-up everything. Not necessarily in a paranoid way where you are never doing anything new and instead just making sure you have hundreds of copies of the same thing, but in a good way. You never know when a sudden lightning storm might cut the power at home, you throw away a winning lottery ticket or your laptop just decides now would be a good time to play a prank on you and cease to function entirely. The same can be said from inviting your 5 year old cousin over and suddenly your worldly possessions are gone off the face of the Earth. Or covered in drool. Do 5 year olds drool? Oh to be young again.
