Ever had the Blue Screen of Death? Yeah, it’s not pretty, and it’s definitely not fun. For those fortunate enough not to have experienced the BSOD, it basically means that your computer is kaput! Apparently a power outage at the office over the weekend fried my hard drive, so I’m in limbo until it gets fixed, hopefully this morning. Let’s chat about adaptation, shall we?

First, I ended up in the conference room. I pulled up my company email via the exchange server, which isn’t the best source of email software, but it does the job for the afternoon. Unfortunately, I don’t have any of my files on the conference room computer. Semi-fortunately, a good portion of the stuff I needed to accomplish yesterday dealt with files that had been recently emailed to other members of my team. However, the search functionality on the exchange server email is not very helpful, so it took much longer to sort through the emails to find my attachments. However, our files are backed up on a regular basis, so I should be able to get everything back upon installation of the new hardware.

You don’t realize how dependent you are on technology until you don’t have it! You also don’t realize how expectations for turn around time have changed based on technology. It used to be that writing a paper and returning it to someone could take a week, especially if it was hand-written and snail-mailed. Now, with instant communication, changes can be made on-the-fly. In fact, I optimistically promised some changes to our documents by this afternoon, assuming my hard drive arrives and I can get to the files. This also taught me that it’s good to keep things in multiple different places, just in case one place fails. I know a lot of companies might have a security issue with this type of thinking, but for my company’s projects, it works.

In short, I hope you don’t experience BSOD in the near future. For now, I’m waiting patiently (or not so patiently, but I’m trying to learn some patience!) for my computer to be back in good form!