Perspective

I had a horrible day.

It started on Monday with a crashed hard drive and the agonizing wait for 2 whole days to determine how bad the loss was.

Since moving to Ohio our fail-safe back up was not an option--and I will admit I got lazy with the back ups to the extremely slow external hard drive. I had hope that the damage wasn't so bad. The teenaged-looking tech told me that he saved '90%-95% of the hard drive'.

But when I got it back, that 10% had all the vital things I needed. My final reports, my signed documents, my FY12 proposals, all my mail from 2011, my data sheets. Everything. That. Was. Important.

I closed my office door and I cried. The sleep deprived-Reese couldn't pull it together, couldn't take it in stride, or even convince herself that it would be ok. I cried angry, tired tears at the unfairness of it all. My team started to whisper that their fearless leader was melting down. I IM'd my boss that it was all gone. He walked down from the Commander's Suite and offered condolences and bad jokes that eventually lifted my mood. My sweet tech slid a latte across my desk, and quietly said he thought I could use a pick-me up.

I managed to get it together about an hour later. I made a strategic plan about how to bounce back, channeled a little William Wallace ala Braveheart to pump myself up from this awful blow.

Then in the middle of clicking on the files and muttering that this sucked and how awful it all was, I caught glimpse of the date.

Four years ago I was in labor--hellishly awful labor to deliver my dead son.

And it occurred to me that if I survived that, lost files were a cake walk.