a very long night

It is about 6 pm on Friday, the 28th of September. We are putting the finishing touches on Zach's portfolio, and printing a final copy. I have decided that we need to upload some photos using our new card reader, and go ahead and plug it in. It is then that everything falls apart. The computer freezes, and won't respond at all. We turn it off, turn it back on. It won't restart. There isn't power to the keyboard OR mouse. You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach, where you think you are going to throw up with panic? Multiply that by about twenty.


This is the image we were trying to get off the camera. A photo of our thesis book. The one that almost ruined it all.

In our rush to finish everything up we haven't backed up the files. We have piles and piles of backup laying around here... and we didn't backup these particular files. And of course, the computer is doing horrible things, that we have never seen before. Zach begins to rip things out of the computer, trying to discover the source, and shortly thereafter I begin trying to rebuild a week and a half of work in twelve hours. I have given up by now, there is no way we are getting those files off the computer. We continue this panicked mode into the night, working as quickly as possible to salvage what little information we have remaining. And then, amazingly, Zach somehow is able to use another hard drive, in a different computer, and reinstall windows. We plug in the external hard drive to the excruciatingly slow usb 1.0 drive in this old computer, and start pulling the files that we need. At about 5am, we are printing again. We are back to where we were 6pm the night before. I pack our stuff, we take a shower, and walk over to the bus at 6:30. Somehow, amazingly, we had managed to get everything done.

We decided to take an early morning bus from Richmond. Although the bus is always an interesting experience, nothing beats the price. The bus leaves at 7:15 am, which means we wait amongst a desolate landscape on Broad and Boulevard. But, we are on our way to New York, portfolio in hand...