A Lesson Learned?

Rosie learned a big lesson last night.  At least, I hope that she learned the lesson.  The lesson can be called by a variety of different names, but the bottom line was that technology fails.  This is the new version of the "dog ate my homework" excuse- and probably a lot more believable. 

Rosie worked long and hard on writing a Chemistry lab report.  She had text, and equations and a chart.  She did the charting and equation work, and probably most of the writing, on a computer at school.

But you can't save your work onto those computers- so she emailed it to herself and to me.  It wasn't quite finished because she wanted me (a chemist) to look it over.

So the ONLY version of this 5 hours worth of work is attached to an email.  (ominous drumroll please)

So I go to open the document to review it.  Oops.  It won't open.  MS Word tells me to go do something that might make it open, so I do that, but to no avail.

Can you say tears and screaming? (from Rosie, not me)

I asked her where was the memory stick that I had just gotten her that she was supposed to have put on her keychain.  Oops, it was still laying around the condo.

Mom later had some bright ideas and tried to open the doc in other Word processing software and I managed to retrieve the text.  But that's not good enough.

Rosie was pretty inconsolable, but I actually didn't have a lot of pity for her, because I've told her to back it up. (Was I a bad mom for that?)

But the end result was that she went right to the computers when she got to school and was able to print it from the email.  The equation and charting software were on that computer and I guess that made all of the difference. 

Problem solved.  We'll see whether it was a lesson learned.

Comments

[songbird]

Been there, done that. Hopefully she won't repeat that mistake.

[pauline]

That's a hard lesson. We all tend to slip a bit from time to time and not back up something important . . . Now she'll probably back up everything, even twice, until the memory fades.

[Daisy]

Save early, save often - I hope she learned it!

[Ora]

And now actually she learned another lesson in the same week. Her laptop crashed and she didn't have it backed up. Luckily, we were able to recover the recent files, but I think that she lost some ITunes music. Now, I think, she's a believer in back-ups, but we'll see.