How Losing My Most Important Files Made Me Feel Better About Myself

It’s a lazy Friday afternoon and I am on a watching binge. I receive a call from a friend. He asks me if we can catch the premier of Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice together with a mutual friend of ours. Being the cheap bastards we are, we had designated Wednesday — when the discount is 50% — to catch the superhero slug-fest. After a little deliberation, I inform him I’m coming over. Because the show time is late, I tell him I’ll sleep over so I carry some clothes and my laptop to resume work on a project after the movie. When I get to his place, the movie isn’t showing for another two hours. We kill the time by debating religion and bunch of other stuff and before we know it, it is time for the movie.

The movie turns out to be a little underwhelming. When we get back to my friend’s place, I trawl the internet for BvS reviews with my search centered on a single parameter: reviews that are scathing. I get a good laugh or two before my phone blacks out and I transfer my review reading to my laptop. When I try to launch a tab on my browser, my laptop freezes. I try to move the cursor but it won’t budge. I power it off then back on and decide to resume my work pronto. When I check my projects folder, everything is gone. Completely wiped out. I carry out an extensive search for it in vain. At this point I’m like, “fuck it, there are tons of recovery tools out there”, so I download one and after a few minutes, the files are recovered but with just one teeny-weeny problem — the files are irreparably corrupted.

Then begins my descent into madness and despair. Why did the most important folder on my laptop get wiped out while files like: a PDF on how colonoscopy is a front for aliens to carry out clandestine anal probes, The Godfather 3 and a clip an adorable little puppy trying to nudge the door open with its nose survive while I lost my assignments, projects and possible world domination plans?(Okay, I admit it. That puppy clip made me feel things.) And how the fuck did they magically disappear? My first thought is obviously that there’s no God because if there were how could he(or she) let such a thing happen. Then, I remember the semi-blasphemous points I was addressing during the religion debate we had earlier and my stance on the existence of God changes and am now thinking that I must have really pissed off the big guy or girl.(Wait, am I supposed to capitalize ‘g’ here too?) Either that or I was a Nazi in a past life and am paying my karmic dues.

I throw away my superstitions and focus on the flow of the events that led to my cluster-fuck of a situation to see what I could have differently to avoid it. When I fuck something up, I imagine what I could or should have done differently to avoid it. I go through a series of ‘what if?’ scenarios. What if I passed on the chain letter? What if I left at thirty seconds into 6:42 instead of twenty two seconds into 6:42?

Let’s start with the final few moments before the event. What could I have done differently? Off the top of my head, I should not have read those reviews. I should have booted up my laptop and gone straight to work like I had planned. But why didn’t I do that? Well, because BvS was meh. Why was the movie meh? Because Zack Snyder isn’t the best director in town. Why? Maybe it had to do with film school where he was classmates with Michael…wait for it…Bay. Why was he classmates with Bay? Maybe if he filed the film school application earlier he would have been assigned to a different class from Bay. Why didn’t he do that? Maybe he had a boner the morning of the application sending and the time he spent waiting for it to cool off meant sending those papers later than he intended. At this point I realize this whole cause and effect chain stretches all the way back to the dawn of jus — man. The dawn of man.

Let’s also consider the other factors in play like the fact that it was Good Friday so I could make the time to go catch BvS or the fact that the sun rose that day or that the DC executives acted like pussies and rescheduled BvS from May to March. There are a million other factors at work here. You’ve heard of the popular theory of a butterfly at point A causing a tornado at point B. The fact is it could have been one at point C or D plus there are a lot factors that come into play to form a tornado. Where am I going with this? A butterfly flapping its wings can’t own its own set off a chain of events that culminate in a tornado. There are a bunch of other things involved. Let’s look at another scenario: say your future dad was preparing for his daily commute to get to work via bus and that your future mom was on that bus too but that was the only time she would ever take that bus because she was just visiting that town and leaving for good. Let’s say your dad decided to have two bagels for breakfast instead of one he usually had and because of this delay of having an extra bagel, he would end up getting the same seat as your mom, probably say something cheesy to her, bond with her, marry her and later have you. What if your dad had one bagel instead and he got a seat far away from your mom and didn’t get the chance to talk to her? One might suggest that they wouldn’t have met hence you wouldn’t have been born. But this only holds up if other factors are ignored like the weather being sunny and not rainy which prompted some kid to take his new bike out for a spin and because your dad left home earlier, he was knocked down by that kid giving him the time delay needed to meet your mom. Had he left later, he wouldn’t have run into the kid. Also the event of running into the kid is dependent on other factors. So, it’s not just cause and effect. It’s causes and effect. Your being here today is a product of a farrago of totally unrelated factors that inadvertently conspired with one another to yield an event — your birth. Just think, what are the odds that combined effort of all those factors would result in you? Pretty fucking slim. In a sense, you’re a miracle. So when your parents called you ‘special’ as kid to make you feel better after you came in last in the spelling bee, they were telling the truth. They probably just didn’t know it. Sometimes I feel that things never go my way but when I think about how I beat the odds to be here,I shrug off that feeling and move on.