In Celebration of a Small Victory

In life sometimes we need to remind ourselves of small victories.

In my case my victory has been in fixing my laptop unaided.

Yes, it was the dreaded update that caused the problem, resulting in a total crash on Friday. I have learned from past mistakes and now save everything to an external hard drive. This foresight allowed me to restore everything without bursting into tears and lamenting the loss of precious work.

It does however steal time, which could be better spent elsewhere as the printer and scanner had to be reinstalled.

This incident reminded me how much we depend on technology to store things, that in a time gone by we would keep and record in a more physical way. The joy of opening a box of old photos or notebooks is to some, myself included, a delightful experience. Maybe because of this experience, I still enjoy printing off photos to hold and study in my hand not on a screen, and to write in a variety of notebooks using different inks and pens. Is it virtuous to keep to these traditions?

I wonder if generations to come will experience the same joy from finding old USB sticks, or will they be as obsolete as beta video recorders, and the information on them lost forever.

In a world where technology is constantly changing, we need to rapidly adapt to keep up, and be able to fix it when things go wrong. The world of business gallops at great speed, and the old fashioned way is not always compatible with modern life, save for one advantage… it doesn’t need a restore button.