I'm Flying High after My Hard Drive Crash

It was a typical Tuesday morning.

I needed to review multiple documents and emails from my staff so that we could finalize closing the Big Box Company’s books for the current financial reporting period.  As usual, our department was running behind our quarterly closing schedule.

In my small Finance universe, the Corporation was relying on me and my team to complete our quarterly financial responsibilities and report our operating division’s results, consolidating our earnings with the other divisions, surpassing Plan amounts, raising our Company’s stock price and increasing our senior management team’s stock options.  I mean that’s how it usually goes, right?

However, after multiple attempts at logging onto to my laptop, I was staring at one serious and nasty looking error message.  While I’m no IT guru, I knew enough to know this message did not appear on my screen when I logged on yesterday and I quickly surmised that this was not good news.

I knew the drill.  Submit an electronic “Help” ticket online and wait for an email response to arrive in my email inbox.  However, since I could not access any of my computer applications, I was curious how this problem resolution cycle would proceed.  So I called the Help Desk and waited.  In less than 48 hours, I had my answer in the form of a Temporary Consultant named Sylvio.

Everything in the Corporate World these days is either temporary, contracted, part-time and without benefits, both real and implied……

After about 40 minutes with Sylvio, and after answering a series of mind-numbing questions while allowing him to access my laptop, he informed that his initial prognosis was that there was something definitely wrong with my hard drive.  However, he would need to access my laptop remotely later tonight to confirm the diagnosis but it did not good for my Lenovo T-50.    

Something very surprising happened next.

I’m not sure, but what I think happened was that I gave myself permission “not to care”. For a brief moment, in an industry and profession where columns of data must add up and be logical - I suddenly didn’t care.  Didn’t care as in…..“I don’t give a rats’ ass if my laptop lives or dies”.  At stake was all the data that had at one time filled my neat and orderly little computer folders with all-important names such as Q1 2009, Q2 2009, etc…..  Gone and evaporated.  I quickly reasoned, my fellow co-workers surely had either hardcopy or electronic version (copies) of those emails and spreadsheets, if I need them in the future, I’ll just ask them.  Problem solved.

I immediately liked this new feeling, of not caring!

So, when Sylvio returned on Wednesday to confirm his findings from the previous day, I must have seemed like his happiest customer.  I could sense he was ready for a rapid fire list of questions from me.  But I only had one question, asking him to confirm I could still access a list of 7 or 8 systems applications which I written down from memory.  He confirmed that I would continue to have access since they were on the main server.

He acted like he should feel remorseful that he was not able to do more, never realizing he did more than he would ever know……

Before he left, he handed me a 3 inch by 4 inch piece of metal. It was my sick and infected hard drive.  Affixed to the face of this sterile object was a yellow stickee with my name and office location written in pen.  In the end, this is all that was left.

In hindsight, I think it would have been more dramatic if we would have handled it to me in a pale yellow manila envelope kinda like you see in the movies when the person is leaving prison and all his valuable belongings are included inside.  But physically handing me the actual hardware certainly had a finite feeling to the Hollywood ending scene that played-out ‘only’ in my mind.

He also gave me a piece of paper providing me with written instructions informing me how and where I can send the hard drive to a fourth party vendor who specializes in retrieving data from hard drives when our third party vendor cannot perform those duties.  When Sylvio left, I immediately crumbled up the paper and tossed into my office trash can.  Two points!

When he left my office, I placed the object on my desk, closed my office door and stared at it as if I was waiting for it do something, say something.

My entire work life of nearly five years was trapped in that small metal square.  Inside was literally millions of ones and zeroes comprising once important emails and spreadsheets that literally dictated and controlled my daily, monthly and annual work life.  For nearly 2,000 work days, I logged onto to this devise and it told me what I must do each day, when I could start my day and when I could end my day.  Now it was dead, but I was more alive than ever!

For the “old Scott”, a few years ago, this event would have been just another moment of increased stress and panic.  How was I going to deal with this latest hurdle and bottleneck situation which temporarily stood in my way of being able to do my job each day?

For the “new Scott”, a sudden sense of relief came flowing over me. 

As many of you know, I have clearly been dissatisfied with my corporate career and have been exploring more healthy alternatives in terms of starting new businesses (photography) and pursuing personal goals such as writing and surfing with the goal of ultimately being happy through these new pursuits.

We humans often need to assign a reason to anything that happens in our life.  And since I’m a human, I often subscribe to that theory as well.  Was this a sign from someone or from somewhere saying to me – It’s okay to let go.  You can’t control everything Mr. Accountant.  Oops, that’s soon-to-be former Mr. Accountant to you!

Let’s be clear here - I certainly would not feel the same if I had lost my tens of thousands of photos I have saved on my home computer or the 7,000 songs that currently reside on my iPod.  But - maybe that’s the point.

These photos and songs define me in a way that these work emails could never attempt to define me.   These fleeting images of color and light, chords of notes and air mean something to me.  They meant something the very first time I photographed that particular image or heard that song on the radio.  And even though decades of time have passed, I still remember (well….mostly remember) why these images and tunes mean something to me.

I looked at my new laptop, all spiffy with that new laptop smell.  I gazed over at the 12 new email folders that resided on the left hand column of my Outlook program.  They looked so lonely typed there.  My old laptop probably contained well over 300 email folders, not to mention thousands of emails which called my Sent and Deleted boxes “home”. 

It was the dawn of a new computing day.

With a smile on my face that only I could see, I clicked on the very first email that was at the top of my computer screen. 

And so I began my work day……uncluttered, purged and lovin’ it!

PS – Still “working to live” during the nine to five and “living to work/play” after hours.  Very soon that equation will be reversed.  Come to think of it…..I never heard of someone getting to the end and saying “I really enjoyed the work”.   I don’t recall that same individual saving his final hard drive and placing it on the mantle at home over the fireplace next to his photo of the wife and kids, either.