samedog

Roll back to January this year and I spent the better part of a nice sunny day trying to set up three different e-mail accounts in Entourage (Outlook) on my Mac. I’d done this job many times over for different accounts and never had any trouble, but on this particular day it just wasn’t working.

So after hundreds of google searches, heaps of walks down dead ends in forums and countless test emails to my poor suffering brother, I finally had three working accounts. Add another few hours to the session (hell, I’d gone that far, might as well extend the fun) and I had the most organised, filtered, rule following little e-mail app you could wish for. Even now I’m tearing up at how beautiful it was.

Emphasize the word was. This morning I went to check my messages only to find nothing. I’m not actually sure how you find nothing, but I digress. Oh, there was a welcoming e-mail from the Microsoft Entourage team, so again, nothing.

Somehow my preferences have disappeared into the ether. Now you would think if I had invested a day of my life setting this stuff up that I might have kept some record of the rather complicated settings. Maybe I got caught up in the euphoria of that day, maybe I’m just a dope. Either way, I didn’t.

Now I’m a fastidious backer-upperer. One of my lecturers used to teach the mantra Save Often by sneaking up behind us in class and clicking on the X button to close our work regardless of where we were at. If you were in the habit of saving every few minutes you were fine, if you weren’t, you weren’t. I nicknamed him Cowboy X – part reference to the mysterious workings in a sadistic mind that could take pleasure in the pain of his unprepared students, part homage to the Sesame Street character.

I carried that mantra through to my back ups and I do it habitually. But now I’ve learnt another lesson and once I’ve got my baby configured the way it was yesterday, I’m going to take screen grabs of all the account settings screens so I’ve got a record of how I got there.

So am I going to sit here for ten hours today and figure it all out again? Nup – rainy day in Hobart, day off work, bookshops and coffee are awaiting. I’m having my first e-mail free day in quite awhile. I’ll let you know if I’m in rehab by tonight.