My dad does not call himself a patient or tolerant person.
When I was little, I would beg to go golfing with him. We’d leave the house by 7:30 a.m. for a much anticipated 8 a.m. tee time. First and second holes…fun. Third hole…”Dad, I’m doing fine, stop correcting me.” Fourth hole…”Anna, you’ve been looking at the ball for 10 minutes, go ahead and putt.” Fifth hole…”Anna, you can’t expect it to go in the hole when you’re not aiming toward it.”
I wouldn’t trade those Saturdays for anything, but lunch couldn’t come fast enough.
He is compulsive about details, but scatterbrained. A combination that stresses me out. I tend to stop listening when I’m angry, a trait he would likely change if he could.
All of that to say that this morning, the same man who so quickly became annoyed on the golf course was as he appears below.
I woke up this morning with back pain and the nagging discomfort of slept in contacts. A cup of coffee and bowl of cereal later, I remembered something from Komen that I wanted to finish over the weekend. So I sat in my new desk chair, looked out the window, turned on some Miles Davis, and typed. Tedious, careful, specific. I fine tuned the paragraphs and clicked my mouse over the save icon.
I logged on to gmail to send it to my boss and selected “attach a file.”
SHIT.
I immediately knew what had happened. Not the first time, but hopefully the last, I had pushed “save” rather than “save as” when working in a document opened from an e-mail.
I’ve done this approximately twice a year since I was 15, and every single time, I stare at the screen in denial, confident that my efforts can be resurrected.
“It’s GOT to be on my list of recent documents,” I thought.
It wasn’t.
I picked up my phone and dialed the number.
“Good morning, sweety,” I heard from the other line.
“Daddy, I have a question.”
The familiar tone in my voice probably told him one of approximately 10 things were about to come out of my mouth. (At least half of those 10 are technology related)
“Yes, sweetheart.”
(Insert pathetic desparation here) “When I open something in an e-mail, change it, and save it, where does it go?”
“Did you ‘save as’?”
“No, but I did save it. I know I did. So it HAS to be somewhere.”
“It doesn’t HAVE to be somewhere. It should be saved in the e-mail. Go look and see if the document attached to the e-mail is different now.”
It was not.
“Dad, it’s not different in the e-mail, but it just HAS to be saved somewhere. I pushed ‘save,’ so it has to be. It didn’t just go nowhere.”
“Hunny, it might have gone nowhere if you didn’t press ‘save as,’ because it hasn’t been saved on your hard drive. I’m really sorry.”
My end of the phone was consumed with utter disappointment. But something tells me that one the other end, there was a smile.
Thanks!