Thoughts In The Key Of N

The events that occurred late yesterday taught me a well overdue, but nasty, NASTY lesson.

I didn’t elaborate last night as the event enraged me so, that if I were to dwell on and explain it to you all, I likely would have ended up throwing something through a window. So I took the cheaper path, and let it go for the night. Now I am calm.

What happened, dear reader, is that we had an evening out, I got home late, and was motivated to make some good progress, small timeframe be damned! Progress WAS good, my short-hand notes proved invaluable, shortcut keys made effective use of the gaps in my staccato-like typing, a key conversation was constructed, the important twist emerged, and the first mystery was indeed solved! A very productive session!

And so I reached a good stopping point, and my usual ritual of shortcut keying a save, then a close, then a just-as-rapid selecting from the annoying dialog saying “There are changes, do you want to Save, Don’t Save, Cancel.” Given I had just saved, I closed this dialogue quickly, and…then…froze.

My shortcut save? If it had done the job, I’d have been prompted to name the doc (new file for each day…) and it was as I clicked the “Don’t Save” button that this realisation hit. It was a very long split second, but in my mind if was as if someone leaned on the backspace key, and I saw 1,000-odd words evaporate one after the other.

That was horrible.

But there is an upside. In retrospect, (ie: today, with murderous rage having subsided), the stuff I wrote last night was rushed, and there were many corners that had been cut. So, now whilst I have the irritating task of re-writing a section I have already written, I’ve effectively already done a draft of it – albeit a draft I’ll never get to read.

Take your time when shutting down your computer. No, really.

~ by nick on November 16, 2013.

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