Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Good-bye, Old Friend

Last week, our offices got hit with a virus/worm but it only affected a few people (myself included). Initially, it appeared that the critter didn't do any damage. Our firewalls and virus scans seemed to stop it in its track. As the days progressed, little problems began to emerge and the virus was no longer a thing of the past. It was ever present and quite mischievous. So, I'm working along yesterday when I get an IM from my coworker:

"Hey, are you there?"

"Yep! What's up?"

"S___ just came over and said that IT is going to reimage our computers tomorrow. So, if there's anything you want to keep, you better get it off today."

"Really?"

"Yeah. They gave me a thumb disk to move my files off."

"I've got one, but it's only 128MB. I guess I'll be running back and forth to my desktop for a bit."

So, I did. For two hours I ran back and forth moving files I didn't want to lose. Want to know what most of those files were? Not documents, not pictures, not programs but music. I had tons of music on my computer. More than I ever thought was on it. Those files are huge and with my itty bitty flash drive, it was just back and forth, back and forth for what seemed like forever. Oh, well. At least I have all of my stuff. I hope they'll give me a loaner flash drive that's a bit bigger so that I can move everything back in one go. My coworker said they have one that has about 1 gig, so I'll be looking to use that sucker if I can.

I went over to the IT area just now and saw my work laptop. It seemed so foreign to me. All my desktop documents, pictures, sounds and everything...gone. I know even after I move my files back on I'm sure to have missed something. It will never be the same computer it once was. To bring in a movie reference, I'm reminded of Star Trek: Nemesi.s where the real Data sacrifices himself on a ship and the copy Data is left to remain on the Enterprise. The copy is just that. A copy. Images and traces of the original, but certainly not the original. Am I too sentimental over inanimate objects? You bet I am. The only good thing I can see out of this (besides the killing of the worm) is that my machine will probably be one hundred times faster without all of my stuff on it.

2 comments:

Miss Construed... said...

How true would that be if our Blogs were suddenly to disappear?

It may sound stupid; but I would rather cut off my arm than have my blog deleted. It says everything about me; good and bad. A virtual diary. And yet how simple it would be be erase; with just a key stroke.

Thank goodness so much of history has actually been written on paper!

Enchantress said...

I hadn't even thought about it! The world would truly end without our written therapy. That's how I see it...it's definitely cheaper than seeing one all the time (used for major tune-ups only).

Let's hope Blogger never goes under or runs out of space on their servers.