Last weekend, my .pst file (Outlook) reached and exceeded the 2Gb limit — a limit I neither knew existed nor knew it was coming. I knew my saved email archive was huge, but didn’t realize I had to split it so badly.
Somehow, it preserved my schedule, and I recovered the address book through Thunderbird. But the email for the last couple years is (temporarily?) lost, including emails in my inbox that I rely on to get various projects done.
Apart from remembering a few specific things, I don’t even know what projects and errands I should have done this week, and I’m helpless here waiting for people to call me saying “did you look at the changes yet I need yet?” and “Please get back to me about such-and-such from last week.”
The real kicker is that everything I tried to fix it created one or more new problems. That, coupled with an expired CC on file with PayPal and the new one being missing (along with my wallet, another simultaneous crisis), meant a huge delay in buying software that might fix my problem. Upgrading office temporarily has it’s own fun issues with all sorts of other software.
And replacing my driver’s license may require my original birth certificate in our secure document box. Guess where the key is. Damned if we know. Fortunately, the Escort’s title was somewhere else, so we could at least sell the car without breaking it open … yet.
In the meantime, I’m taking this opportunity to back up everything on my main hard drive (9 DVD’s worth) and re-install my operating system and everything on it. It’s way overdue, and there are more quirks than productivity these days. I often keep the task manager open because IE crashes so often (well over half the time I use it, often after viewing one page). It also thinks I have four scanners of the same name, none of which allows one-touch features. The list goes on.
The bright spot is that while bars crawl across the screen saving and installing stuff, I’ve taken paint brush to hand and am doing all the woodwork in my office finally. I not only feel like I’m doing something — I feel like I’m doing two things at once! And like my wife marvelled about, I can be really upset about computer stuff, then pick up a saw and some wood and be in happy mode almost instantly.
Maybe I missed my profession.