It’s been a long couple of weeks. I haven’t been this tired since I don’t know when. Having survived the NewFronts, the new gig, the Five Boro, the jersey debacle… I figured I had pretty much weathered the storm. A couple more UpFronts, and it was smooth sailing and something approaching the semblance of normalcy.
I was graciously invited to attend the Turner UpFront and, to my surprise, Kanye West was the entertainment for the evening. How very cool! Turns out everybody knew that but me, but that made it even cooler. I was lucky enough that a friend invited me to the VIP section, which allowed for a good view. I put my messenger bag down, and away we went enjoying a damn good concert that I wasn’t expecting.
My eyes were on the stage and not on my bag. I’d let my guard down. Now some people will tell you I have bad luck with laptops, and they wouldn’t be wrong. Some freak things have happened, like a twenty-pound frog that fell off the mantle during a thunderstorm punching a hole in my previous laptop. Or an iPad that was stolen out of the coat room at one of David’s events. But for the most part, I have funky things happen to me, but rarely do I lose things or have things stolen.
It’s not so much the bag got stolen—shame on me for taking my eye off the ball. But it’s the amount of work that goes into getting it all back. I learned long ago that a stable back-up is the key to sanity. So I knew for the most part I would have the data. But it was the trip to the police station, the trip to the Apple store, the not-so-conventional restore, the next trip to the Apple store, and the lack of access to my e-mails outside of using my iPhone.
It takes about 72 hours to really get things back online, nearly 12 hours to restore, and then it’s a matter of figuring out and reconfiguring all the settings. But all the travel from one place to the next is exhausting, and it is not as if your day job is going to stop and wait for you to catch up.
Then you realize there was something else in the bag you forgot about until you look at it: You don’t have keys to get to your home after a very good night, and then suddenly disastrous night. Oh crap, my Kindle is gone as well.
But this is how life is. One second you’ve got something; the next, something very intimate and personal is missing from you life. It takes you by surprise, and then it is a matter of how well you can recover.
Having a good back-up plan is key. It could have been worse. I could have lost everything in that single moment. The pictures of me and David, the site, the e-mails, the videos of us. It’s so easy to do, so easy to forget to do, and devastating when you don’t.
Same goes for depression. Having a good back-up plan for when things aren’t running your way. Working on your coping skills before the storm hits. Having a strategy so that when things begin spiraling out of control, you have something you can reach for, to hold onto, to weather the storm. I’ll probably never get the physical things back (they’ve probably passed hands several times ago), but I was able to mitigate the damage by having a plan.
What is your back-up plan?
