This month I took some great photos.
I snapped more than 250 shots of the BC Bike Race passing over a newly built, 60 foot bridge spanning Anderson Creek. I went out with Tom Barker aboard the BC Navigator on a beautiful day for the Malaspina Regatta. I wrote a nice feature about it too.
I took photos from shore and by boat (once in the afternoon and again in the evening sun) of that floating apartment building that anchored for a day outside Pearson Island. On top of that I had some nude pics of Tara Reid and an interview with a sasquatch.
All that done and mostly laid out — with a full week to finish.
You see, a friend’s stag landed on the weekend before deadline and I was pretty sure that was going to knock out a few brain cells so I got the tough stuff out of the way early.
I’m rarely happy with every detail when I ship off the issue to the printer each month so I was really looking forward to finishing the Spiel at a relaxed pace and refining the pesky details that make me wish I had another day. It was sizing up to be a really good issue.
But you won’t get to see it. I arrived home Sunday night dehydrated and peppered with paintball welts to find a “manufacturer’s defect” had obliterated my computer’s hard drive. With five days left to go, I’d lost everything as far back as my last back-up to an external hard drive — about mid-June. As you read this, the data is (hopefully) getting recovered by the manufacturer in Toronto. They’re trying to extract the 1,000 photos and 4,000 words of writing I lost.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because a similar event occurred last February. That time all the data was recovered the next day and with three days to go and a new computer, I carried on. This time, I literally started over, scrambling to find all the people who had sent me stuff in the past three weeks while getting a new computer operational.
Immediately I thought about pushing back the deadline but it was out of the question. A holiday was planned to start the day after the issue hit the mail and if I jeopardized that somebody would inject me with bleach while I slept. I had no choice but to put in five long, stressful days through the hottest week of the year. All the while, I endured the excruciating irony that if I wasn’t so unusually organized, I wouldn’t have lost so much work.
I won’t do that again.
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