A month or two back we had a huge storm here in Sweetwater County, complete with an orchestra of lightning and torrential rain. I spent the day at work feeling energized by the majesty of it, as I always do when a big storm comes around. I love the feeling.
Things had cleared off by the time I got off work and I drove home with the world in that perfect humid limbo that follows a huge rain, when mother nature has sent new energy into the earth and the air and everything feels brimming with life and possibility.
Then I walked inside my new home, and the strangest thing happened. The lights only barely came on. No problem, I’d just go to the store the next day and get some bulbs. The rest of the house was well lit by the windows at this point in the day.
Or so I thought. Until I fired up my computer. Now I usually have my laptop plugged in, so I leave it in high performance mode which, when it isn’t plugged in, will drain the battery in no time flat regardless of what I’m doing. So imagine my surprise when, power cable firmly in the outlet and computer, my machine suddenly ran out of battery and shut down. Figuring a breaker must have tripped, I checked the box. Nothing wrong.
Any reader who is a fellow writer can imagine the horrific terror that coursed through me at that moment. Had my power cord been fried by lightning? Had my surge protector failed to do its job? What if I had lost data on my hard drive because of it? Was my writing okay? Had I done my usual backups to the flash drive? Had I? HAD I?
Then I remembered that the house was 96 years old. I had only just moved in and hadn’t used all of the outlets myself at that point. Perhaps the inspector had missed this one and it simply didn’t have power. I switched to a different outlet. Still nothing. And another. Still nothing.
Truly despondent at this point I went to use the restroom only the discover that the light in there would barely come on. as well. I went to the kitchen. The microwave was flashing random numbers, dim and barely on. The fridge wasn’t working at all. As I continued to explore I discovered more and more appliances and electrical devices malfunctioning and bemoaned that not one, but all of my appliances had been friend by mother nature’s fury.
And my writing. Years of work. All backed up, yes. But question myself I did. Had I really backed up everything? What might I have missed and how irreplaceable were those handful of things?
Predictions of heartache from lost work and massive headaches from insurance claims haunted me as I called my parents, out of town at the time, to tell my tale of woe.
As fate would have it, a friend of the family had experienced something similar recently and my parents knew the problem was not that all of my electrical devices had been destroyed by the storm, but rather that the transformer feeding into my house was damaged and there simply wasn’t enough electricity making its way into the house to power everything.
Beings of light and goodness sang out in immaculate chorus, heralding that nothing had truly been lost. I had been spared nature’s wrath and later that night had a good laugh about it while staying the night in parent’s home where the stove worked for cooking food.
Sometimes even things we love can scare the crap out of us. I suppose sometimes we need to be scared to remind of us of what we need to do, because you can bet I haven’t forgotten once to do my back-ups since then. So, back-up your files writers. You never know when lightning really will strike.
By the way, fellow writers, for anyone seeking a fast and painless way to back-up a large folder of writing files to a jump drive or external hard drive try the free product Sync-Back Free from 2 Bright Sparks. There’s a paid version if you want extra features, but the free version works great.
