UNITED STATES—Technology can be great for the most part, but at times it can be so frustrating you don’t know what to do with yourself. Some of you might be asking why this has become a conversation for the week? Well it’s easy, I had done some strenuous writing earlier in the week and I am certain, take that back I am beyond certain I saved the work. I wake up the next morning to find a lengthy piece that I had just written on my laptop was nowhere to be found.

Jeez, this is the absolute worst feeling ever. I used to always prewrite content on loose leaf paper or in a notebook because this was a thing that I always feared; it vanishes without a trace. It is baffling to know that technology as secure as it’s supposed to be can still place you in these predicaments where content can be lost at any given moment, so having things on paper you can at least stash them away for future reference.

To say I was livid would be an understatement because I’m now forced to have to rewrite content that I already wrote and the problem is the thoughts I had when I first wrote it, are not likely to be the same the second time around. That is extremely frustrated because NOT only am I double doing work, I’m placed in a situation where I don’t even want to redo what I already did. I may as well just take the loss and live with it.

This dates back to my undergraduate days where I had like a 10-page paper do for my 19th Century Literature class. I had been working on this paper for at least 2 weeks and back then you didn’t have flash drives you had floppy disks. Yeah, if you show that to someone nowadays they probably wouldn’t have a clue as to what you were showing them. I had finished my paper while at home from work. I travel back to campus to do some tweaks on the assignment before its due and guess what, it’s not on my floppy disk.

I immediately go into panic mode because I have a massive paper due in like less than 8 hours and I haven’t had any sleep. I’m checking multiple floppy disks in my possession and the paper is nowhere to be found. I’m literally crushed; I have to write this paper all over from the start. I’m certain I dropped a ton of expletives along the way, but that is technology for you it’s NOT RELIABLE. After about 5-6 hours of just non-stop writing I perfect the paper and literally hope for the best because in a sense I was rushing to get the paper done.

Long story short, it was indeed some of my best work because it was the first time ever I got a perfect score on a research paper. Not a single thing was wrong with the paper and man was I happy to say the least. Is this to say that technology faulting helped me? No, it could just be a case of being under pressure can cause people to sometimes produce their best work, when they least expect it.

At the same time I have come to the realization that technology is not 100 percent foul proof. Your tablet, your cellphone, your desktop, your TV, your streaming device, your desktop, and your laptop can go haywire at any moment. So this is not me just advocating backup your content, make notes of things that you do, especially the ones that are vital. When I say vital I mean if something happens to it, it places you in a major pickle one that may not be that easy to wiggle yourself out of to say the least. I used to think that just clicking the ‘SAVE’ button would protect me from surprises, but I’ve learned that just because you click SAVE does not mean your device is going to save it.