Some chips of glass are still sprinkled across the parking lot behind our office. Little jewels.
I got the call two Sundays ago. We were at the farm. Wind was blowing and the air was cold, and I saw a message show up on my voice mail from my neighbor who has no reason to call me on a Sunday unless something has gone wrong. Bad AT&T coverage at the farm, so the message took a while to get there. I rested against the fence, staring at the grass while I listened to the message, rubbing my forehead between my thumb and index finger. I hung up, still staring at the grass, but not really. After a moment my eyes focused on a mustard colored stroke in the mat of green. Laying there was a 3B pencil, the kind we use for hand drafting or sketching. Totally bizarre and ironic. A pencil in the middle of a pasture in this situation, like it was dropped from space just for my amusement. I’m not making that up.
They took everything a teenage kid would want. They left the fax machine, they left the phones, they even left some checks sitting on our admin desk. But they got the computers, all of them. And the camera. And the server. And the backup. That’s the one that hurt.
We had an off-site back-up from June. Thankfully, because if we hadn’t, we were done. But 9 months of work have just evaporated. I’ve gotten used to redundancy: I have email that shows up in 3 different places, backup files on my workstation and on the server and on the backup drive (which was next to the server), and now I’ll go looking for something and think, “oh, well I’ll just get it off of the…” and there’s nothing there.
The alarm was on, but it didn’t work. Not the motion, not the glass break.
We pulled ourselves together, though. By late Wednesday, we had a couple of shiny new workstations and a new server back up and running. We figured out where we stand, whats there and what isn’t. This week we should be clicking. There’s no point in getting pissed. Its gone, and that’s it. There’s no ‘undo’ button for this. We just have to move on.
I’ve got that pencil with me. I’ve been carrying it around in my briefcase. Now we have an off-site back up. So should you.
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