We have been trying to sell our home and at a recent Open House, when I was not at the house, my laptop was stolen from my desk. According to our realtor, it was a “quiet” Open House so my first reaction was to be angry with her since how could anyone leave carrying my laptop if she were paying attention? Upon remembering that my realtor is my wife, I quickly changed my tune.
Our natural reactions to most upsetting things is to lash out and blame. We have a president that has made that his main policy so why shouldn’t I try and blame someone. The truth, which I quickly realized, was it was no one’s fault except for the thief. Thus began a number of lessons learned!
Obvious Lessons:
~~ Back up everything that matters in multiple ways. Thankfully, I had both Carbonite and three back-up hard-drives, one of which is kept in a safe deposit box at my bank. Turns out that my Time Machine back up hadn’t completed a full back up in over two weeks so I did lose a couple of weeks worth of writing and email: in the scheme of things, no biggee. I was grateful I had the important stuff.
~~ Don’t leave valuables OUT when you’re house is OPEN!
~~ Have insurance! I had insurance for theft, but with a pretty substantial deductible. AND, I had “replacement cost” insurance which turned out to be quite important given my particular computer was no longer being made and had little value. But, with the replacement cost insurance, I got credit for the newest model and did get some reimbursement. Well, “it’s in the mail.”
The REAL Lessons:
~~ Things don’t matter; people do. I almost hurt my marriage by blaming my wife. Thankfully, I pulled back from that foolish gut reaction VERY quickly and, thankfully, she chose to ignore my momentary lapse.
~~ Do be sure you’ve got ALL your back up plans operational all the time. In my case, losing a couple weeks of minor emails and a column or two was nothing. When I got my new computer and told the Apple peeps that I was replacing a stolen one, they told me how many customers has NO back up whatsoever.
~~ Stop living your life at a keyboard! Heck, I was so mortified by my computer’s loss that I felt literally stolen for a short while. A good friend of mine is tech-illiterate (not a good thing either) and her reaction to my computer loss was “what’s the big deal?”
