On Losing Work
I was on the phone talking to a colleague about an important work project when the unthinkable happened. I was gesticulating for emphasis with one hand (a silly thing since he could not see me through the phone line), when I knocked a mug of tea onto my laptop. It was a direct hit. Tea splashed across my keyboard in a tiny tsunami and my laptop gave out a gasp, an out-breath, a releasing of a digital soul: ffuhp! …and the screen went black.
I leapt out of my chair, snatching up my laptop, dumping the tea onto my desk and floor and frantically wiping down my keyboard with everything I could reach – a sleeve, a Kleenex, a napkin. Somehow, I finished the phone conversation with acceptable professionalism. I told my colleague on the phone that I had spilled some tea but let’s keep going, it’s fine. I’m sure it’s fine. We got back on topic and finished the call, but I was preoccupied, staring at my dark screen.
A hair dryer and paper towel-filled hour later, I knew the truth. That was the end of my beloved laptop, my constant companion. I had killed it; its soul had departed.
Back it up. Now.
The Genius Bar guy looked sympathetic and asked me if I had backed up my work. Incredibly, I had. He was surprised. In the end, I ‘only’ lost a week of work, and I only had to live without a computer for a week before a new one could be shipped to me. But it was sheer misery, and I mourned every bit of work I had lost.
My current work in progress is the story of Japanese feminist poet Yosano Akiko. Her magnum opus was a translation into modern Japanese of the world’s first novel, The Tale of Genji. Written around 1000 A.D., the story is over 1,000 pages long, and the original text is all but indecipherable to modern readers without the help of translation and commentary like Akiko’s.
She embarked on her translation around 1909, receiving monthly installment payments from a friend and patron. Akiko supported her large family on her writing, so these payments were critical, spurring her on to complete sections of Genji work little by little, squeezing in writing sessions around travel, prodigious publication of original poetry, social commentary, and children’s stories, lecturing, and almost annual childbirth and chronic poor health. She literally burned the midnight oil to keep up with her monthly commitments, often with a baby suckling at her breast. She suffered from horrible headaches and vertigo. Sometimes she could barely see straight or put coherent sentences together. But she kept at it, and the years ticked by.
As the manuscript grew in bulk and she grew close to completing it, the prospect of losing it became unthinkable. She decided it was not safe in her study at home, which was vulnerable to flood or fire. She moved it for safekeeping to a secure building at the Bunka Gakuin School in downtown Tokyo, where she was a lecturer and founder.
This was before digital backups or copy machines, of course. She couldn’t upload a copy to DropBox or Google Docs. There was only one copy.
On the first day of September 1923 at 11:58 am, as lunch cookfires burbled away across the greater Tokyo region, and a hot, dry summer wind blew, it happened. A massive earthquake shook the Kanto plain. Hundreds of thousands of buildings collapsed in a moment, and hundreds of fires caught in the rubble. The fires became a conflagration; a horrific series of firestorms and twisters that incinerated whole neighborhoods, killing hundreds of thousands of people and leaving almost two million people homeless.
Akiko and her family (and ironically, her house) were spared, but the Bunka Gakuin School was reduced to a smoking ruin, and her entire manuscript was lost. More than a decade of work, for which she had been receiving monthly advances, became a pile of ashes on one very bad day. It must have been devastating. She didn’t write much about it in the aftermath—in fact, for all her voluminous publications, her silence on this topic is telling. She did not find the strength to restart the project for years. It puts my spilled tea incident in perspective.
The lesson from all of this? You know it already. I don’t have to tell you. When did you last back up that important work project? Where is it kept? Do you have another copy in a third location? Akiko would look at you with one raised eyebrow, perhaps.
Back it up, she would say. Now.
