what, are you stupid or somethin' boy?

this morning i was in a state of shock and awe shortly after logging into my computer at work. you see, i have been tasked with running several dozen extraordinarily mundane and time consuming reports. these reports require only time and patience to run, and require little to know intelligence.

which is exactly how i handled this situation this morning.

you see, since my coworker is on holidays, i am making use of her computer to take care of half of this workload in an effort to double my productivity. half of the reports will be stored on her computer. the other half, having been run on my computer, would be stored in a shared folder on my computer where I would be able to then copy these to her computer so the entire list could be sent.

running these reports in tandem carried on for much of the morning and afternoon yesterday to bring me roughly to the half-way point in my completion. this morning i found that all of the reports stored exclusively on my shared folder had been deleted. gone. no trace at all.

"fuck," i says as i starts to get mad. "time for a coffee break."

the acquisition of coffee and consumption of pop-tarts did not return the missing reports to my shared folder, so i emailed the IT guys thinking that it must have been something they did. "perhaps," i thought, "the sharing of folders is forbidden. perhaps this is some rule about which i am not aware."

files had disappeared mysteriously before, but they were music files and images copied from other folders - so no big deal about the loss of those. my email was polite, but with a very concerned tone asking if there was some policy in effect, and if my reports had fallen victim to its wrath.

about 5 minutes after sending the email i realized something. i checked the date on the files that still remained in the folder - all from the previous day at 7:15 pm. coincidence? a curious one if it were that, because i left the office at 2:30 in the afternoon.

you see, i created a backup application that takes all of my code files and documentation and puts them into a shared folder on my computer so that in my absence, anyone could easily have access to any of my work-related files. the backup job deletes all of the files in the shared folder and replaces them with the most up-to-date files.

what did i just say? deleteds ALL of the files in my SHARED folder?

i quickly recalled the email message i sent and replaced it with an apology citing my own stupidity. were it not for the existence of pop-tarts and coffee i probably could have gotten myself fired, but you know how pop-tarts give you that sudden jolt of common sense.