Angst Report

Apple erased my entire life last night around 1 a.m., so I had to defy the time-space continuum and go retrieve it.

Sure, I like it when a few of the squares in my calendar are blank. That means I get to sleep late, read in bed, go for a walk, etc. But when they are all blank that means that, as Jack Nicholson might say, “What we have is a failure to communicate.” I would append….with the machine that stores all your dental appointments, speaking engagements, days you have to cover for others, not to mention commencement obligations and picking up your sister from the train! And not just the machine — it’s never just one machine these days — it’s the cloud. It’s the network of devices that share all the intimate details of your life.

I won’t bore you with all the details. Noticing the MobileMe wasn’t synching my computers, updating some calendar software, blah blah blah. Let’s just say that for an hour, as I pulled every data-retrieval trick out of the hat that I could think of, I wondered just what I was going to miss and who was going to be really mad at me.

And even though it’s somewhat comforting that you can roll back time, it’s a little unnerving to enter Apple’s Time Machine. For example, I just took a little ride in it to see if I could take a little screenshot of my experience and now everything is missing from my desktop.

I have a feeling that I’ll get all that crap back too.

But what’s next? It’s beginning to feel like my computer is picking my pockets.