Losing It - Exporting To Nowhere

Novice computer users have it good. They do not know what they are doing and anything that works is a victory - even if it is occasionally a pyrrhic one. As long as the screen does not go solid blue all is good.

Further on, when we get to our digital adolescence and the html hormones start to surge, we get more adventurous. We load our computers with a bazillion files and then try to save them, export them, or back them up somewhere. We would, in many cases, be better backing up an articulated bus through the back streets of Balga. At least when it all went pear-shaped the bus would be wedged into someone's lounge room - not vanished into the aether...never to be found.

I still do this - the files, not the bus. While the makers of the computer and the various programs are experts and provide clear questions and instructions about where the files will be going to...sometimes they use words differently than I do, and I fail to understand what they mean. Sometimes I also fail to see some part of the specifications and it results in me launching a file to nowhere. I can only assume it reaches this destination, because I never find it again.

The iMac computer at home does have one little section that seems to find things. I can ask the hard drive where a file is and eventually it will report a location. The macBook Pro here at work may have this facility as well, but I haven't found it yet. As a result, when I lose a bit of work that I have just saved, I resort to the trick of making another one of the same sort and then watching it step-by-step as it is exported. Frequently I can find where the first stray has gone - and almost always it is because I failed to specify the right target before I pulled the first trigger.

Please note: If things go wrong for you, it is sometimes because your computer has mutated all on its own in the night. The simple pathway you learned to take when you did your first work has been changed by secret command from the computer manufacturer or the software company. They do this after you have gone to bed at night. It's best to unplug you computer entirely after use and put a tinfoil hat over it to prevent alien cosmic space commands from doing this. Also wear one yourself. I favour a metallic pie plate strapped to my head in summer...

Uncle Dick