The trolls in the computer

I don't usually have anxiety nightmares about the computer. My nightmares are usually, and I guess tellingly for some skilled Dream Reader, about being stalked or misplacing my purse or forgetting where I parked my car. None of which, thankfully, happen in real life.

But that all changed last night.

I had spent almost six straight hours of my day sitting here in front of the super computer my mami gave me as a dissertation-writing present. Intensely focused and happily typing away, I had made great progress at completing my chapter, the first one that is fully finished and polished and ready for the entire dissertation committee to read. The one I had told everyone concerned that I was turning in today.

Close to 5:30 p.m., when I was done and satisfied and proud of my work, I hit the save button with a big smile, thinking of the movie I would watch that evening in celebration of now having a little time to relax before undertaking my next chapter.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

I had been constantly saving to a thumb drive and to the desktop but for the past two hours had forgotten to save to the latter because I had been in my Zen zone of writing. When I clicked on the little floppy-disk icon, the computer flashed several panic-inducing and scream-producing error messages and my finished and beautiful and hard worked file vanished. Yes, the file completely disappeared from the thumb drive.

I sometimes think that wolves are my familiar and my howling might have convinced anyone passing by of that, too.

The version on the desktop, the 3:33 p.m. version, was two hours and a lot of blood, sweat and tears behind. The finished product had gone into computer La-La Land.

I received my husband at the door in near hysterics (the poor man thought one of the dogs was dead) and he proceeded to do anything and everything he could to find the vanished file. But to no avail.

At about 8:15 I gave up and started the process of retracing my steps, trying to reconstruct the lost hours of creativity and effort. It was almost midnight by the time we went to bed.

Oh, well. Of course, it's not even remotely like one of the dogs died. But I'm scarred for life and likely will have nightmares, from now on, about my hard-earned chapters getting kidnapped by the dissertation-eating trolls in the computer.