YIKES!!!!!

I had a very traumatic experience this week, and this picture from Cats-Mania.com accurately depicts how I felt as a result of it. Wednesday marked my 7th year anniversary at my current place of employment. Every document, every spreadsheet, every report, every-single last thing I've typed and prepared over the last 7 years have been stored on an external drive. So imagine my horror on Monday, when I went to open up this drive to retrieve a document, and it was nowhere to be found! After picking up my heart which had fallen to the floor, I tried all I knew to do to locate/reinstall the drive. After racking my brain, I called our IT person in hopes of solving the problem. Long story short, he did all he knew to do, but after various attempts to retrieve my files nothing worked, and it did not look good when we left the building on Tuesday afternoon. He took the hard drive with him and said he wanted to try one other thing. I must say, I had given up hope, and went home devastated. I was a zombie. That evening, actually, in the wee hours of the morning, after waking up and not being able to go back to sleep because I was worried, I did the last thing I knew to do. I prayed and asked the Lord to help me. When I walked into the office on Wednesday morning, my assistant Deborah informed me that Troy, the IT person, had called to say he had good news. I am absolutely ecstatic to report that God, through Troy and Justin at IBS Communications, restored every-single last file. When I got the news, all I could do was cry, because I knew God heard me and answered my prayer immediately. He was just waiting for me to get to the office to give me the news. Thank you Troy, thank you Justin for all your hard work, persistence and commitment to retrieving and restoring my files. I was and still am elated and eternally grateful.

This also was a trying week for my sister Candie, who turned 39 on Thursday. She too experienced computer problems to devastating proportions. On her birthday, her computer, which she's only had for 6 months, decided to CRASH! Gone, Caput, Bye-Bye…you get the point. Fortunately, there's a happy ending to her story as well. Dell expressed a new hard drive to her, which she was able to get installed quickly, and she is now back up and running. She lost some of her more recent work, but through back and forth email communications, and back up files from her previous computer which crashed 7 months ago, she was not at as much of a loss as I would have been had it not been for a miracle. So the moral of my story….BACK IT UP and PRAY!