Save As

Sitting here at High Point on another Sunday morning, I'm reminded of my "oops" from last week.

I spent about three hours last Sunday morning working on my second publication--the response to a reply written to my first article. Anyway, as I've warned my students to do, I had emailed myself a copy of the piece that I'd spent five hours on during Saturday afternoon. (emailing to myself assures a version is saved other than just on my hard drive and allows me to work on the piece both from home and school.) And so, arriving at High Point a week ago, I accessed the emailed file and got to typing.

A few times Sunday evening, I thought about emailing it back to myself--so I could access it at work on Monday. I had about another two or three hours of work left on it, and it was due on Monday to the editors in California. But I decided instead I'd do it Monday morning.

Much to my horror, Monday morning, no file was to be found. What?! I searched and searched my hard drive, but I could find nothing more than the ghost of just a temporary file--unable to be accessed. What was I to do?

Well, I did the only thing I could: rewrote it. (My secretary said I was abnormally calm, but what would crying have done? I'd just have to type through blurry vision.) And so yes, most of Monday, aside from the times I had to teach, was spent on rewriting what I'd lost and writing what I needed to add. I asked the editor for one more night, asking to proof it one last time on Tuesday. Thankfully, she agreed.

I got the piece written, proofed it again on Tuesday, and all is fine. Of course, I find myself on Sunday, not totally prepped for next week--with the extra hours spent last week on this writing. And so here I am at High Point, contracts book here, about to type up my class notes. I emailed them to myself yesterday from school.

Deja vu, you fear? No, I think, with the help of Rob, our IT dude, what happened.

When you email a file to yourself and open it on another computer, be sure to FIRST save it to your computer. I think instead I just opened the darned thing, wrote and wrote, and never actually saved it to my computer. Sigh.

And so I've already saved my emailed class notes to this hard drive. I'll update them now, save them again, and email them back to me.

Lessons learned. Just be sure to always "save as." :-)