digital disaster

Friday’s are usually the busiest day of my workweek, Monday being production. Everything always converges on Friday, a lot of photo ops, charity BBQ’s, performers at the old folks home, concrete pouring at the new pool, workers preparing for a big weekend football tournament etc. It’s when I’ve settled on stories and know who I have to talk to etc and I start to feel the pressure of needing everything done by Monday and not wanting to work all weekend (which I seem to anyway).

This Friday our Ed was away and I’d let things pile up more than usual—a lot of things were planned for Friday out of my control—so I had a really busy morning, especially photo wise. By the time I got back to the office to download the digital camera (which has a wonderful 1-gig card) I had well over 100 pictures from 7-8 different events or locations. It was around 12:30 and I had been working my ass off for 4 hours.

The download screen popped up on the computer and instead of thumbnails of pictures there were squares with big red question marks in them. Despite the sudden sickening feeling I stayed calm and spent over an hour trying to recover the images (with the help of the computer shop next door) while running out with the crappy ass back-up camera to catch a couple other planned photo ops.

In the end it looks like the pictures are long gone & unrecoverable. They said they can usually recover things like that (the photo’s are never really gone, just copied over) but they don’t know what’s going on, they can see where the pictures are (or were) but can’t access them.

Not only did I lose a crucial and unrepeatable morning of work, but was left without a card I could trust. By the time this reality set in it was pushing 2 and the 3 person production team was sitting around waiting for something they could use to start laying out the paper—without my pictures there’s little point in starting—which they usually get half done on Friday afternoon. I bought another card and ran around frantically inventing things to take pictures of and somehow managed to pull it together enough by the end of the day to at least be confident that I’ll pull it off over the weekend, but that was a hell of a day, and now it means once again I get to work through the weekend.

Moral: even if it’s inconvenient, download pictures as often as possible throughout the day – don’t trust bits and bytes. Those digital photos don’t actually exist on your camera, just a memory of them.

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Homer (on phone): “They were the suckiest bunch of sucks that ever sucked.”
Marge: “Watch your mouth.”
Homer: “I gotta go, my dam wiener kids are listening.”