Always Backup!!

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.

They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.

Seconds before the end, a bolt of lightning struck taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with.

Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything, yet
Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?!”

God chuckles, “Jesus saves.”

This joke came to my mind after lunch today as a vivid reminder of the panic I could have avoided before lunch....Okay, here's the story. I am an aspiring writer. I have several children's books written, along with 19 chapters of my first novel, and about 7 chapters of a young reader novel, a few short stories, and several poems. All of these are saved on a compact little zip drive. I keep this zip drive in a small holder, which clips into a mesh net on the inside of the case I carry my portable DVD player in. The case is with me always, at home and at work. Today at break I went to get my headphones out of my DVD case. I find that it is not zipped up. I also find my zip drive is not clipped to the mesh. Panic insues...I don't even worry about the fact that my DVD player could have fallen out and broken. All I can think of is that I have no back up for most of the stuff on this zip drive. I have paper copies of some of the items, but all that typing...argh!! So I paniced... I sent a text message to my mother-in-law to pleases check around my desk for the zip drive. She was helping out in my daughter's class room, but said she would look when she got home.

So as I waited to hear from her, I was trying to calculate how long it would take to retype all the lost material, and how much this would cut into my actual new writing. I remembered the scene in Little Women where Amy (a young Kristen Dunst) throws Jo's manuscript into the fire. I remembered the anger/agony in Jo (Winona Ryder) as she realized her work was gone. And i realized I was both Amy and Jo in this case...If my work was lost it was only me to blame. As I was eating my lunch, two and a half hours after the initial discovery, I received the message that my zip drive was safe on my desk. My two and a half hours of panic and fear and stress was over.

Oh, yeah, when I got home I made a back up!!