Losing Your Hard Drive Is Like Taking A Nice Vacation

There is a tendency for all of us to get caught up in our day-to-day affairs, bogged down by the things we’re writing, our calendars, and all our financial records. So hectic is our multi-gigabyte life we forget to sit back, relax, and lose all of our data.
A vacation, like a hard drive meltdown, takes us away from all our works-in-progress, photographs, and genealogical research. When you have no other worries than sipping a Pina Colada or touring an old cathedral, your mind clears out – just like your hard drive does when the reallocated sectors count reaches the threshold.
Sitting on a tropical beach is a welcome retreat from the monotony of the daily grind. After all the pressures of the workaday world have built up, and our brains are at maximum capacity, a vacation cures us. It distances us from friends, family and business associates – as if your entire address book had been turned in to a bunch of zeroes.
When sitting on a Swiss hilltop or paddling the Grand Canyon, your mind is at ease. Thoughts of checking email, reading a blog about someone’s favorite cereal or downloading a 15-second teaser from Pinkworld are far from your mind; as far from your mind as the applications that allow you to check email, read a blog, or view pornography are from recovery.
Losing your hard drive puts things in perspective, just like a vacation. Free from the congestion of your normal surroundings, you’re able to paint a better picture. You suddenly really understand what’s important, or what was important. With this clean slate, inspiration comes easier, as do answers. Questions like “Should I back up my data more often?” no longer require much deliberation. The answer seems as obvious as the Caribbean is blue.
When you return from your vacation, your mind is as clear as a brand new 180 gigabyte hard drive. The roadblocks in your synapses have been disassembled. You approach everything with a new vigor and a clarity of vision. The same clarity that has you kicking yourself for not purchasing backup software like Retrospect, version 6.0.178.
The days after returning from a vacation are your best chance to address everything with a fresh perspective and start over, as if reinstalling your system software onto a completely blanked surface. Even if that surface is riddled with bad blocks, your energized outlook allows you to overlook them. For a while, anyway.
Losing your hard drive is like taking a nice vacation. Though I’m still glowing from this most recent trip, I can’t help but plan for the next one. I’ll be heading to CompUSA post-haste.