I inadvertently deleted the year 2013. I’m sorry if that was a good year for you. If you can no longer find evidence, or photos from 2013, it’s my fault. During the summer heat I started going through photos, both digital and hard-copy. I thought I should keep all of the electronic photos organized by year in one place on an external hard-drive. Once sorted, I started deleting the bad blurry ones (there were so many) followed by deleting redundant and unnecessary photos, like pictures of other people’s dogs that I don’t remember. Finally, I deleted what I thought was an empty subfolder. But it turned out to be all of the year 2013. Woops.
I’ve been watching a lot of science fiction on Netflix lately and based on those fine plots I’m quite sure that when I deleted the folder, I deleted 2013 across the entire extent of the internet. So, if you find that there is no reference to 2013 across the whole world wide web… it’s my fault. If instead you start finding bits and pieces of 2013, then you will know I’ve been able to re-create parts of the year. I just have to find my old nerd-sticks where I backed up old pictures. And query all family members for replacements. I’m not overly concerned. What are my kids going to do with all those old pictures anyhow? There are still upwards of 8,000 after deleting. Back in the days of film cameras my parents took what seemed like a lot of pictures that now sit in cupboards and boxes. Compared to that, with all of our easy picture taking tools, my photos represent an exponential increase. Will my kids care that I lost a whole year documenting their young lives? I think not. I hope not. Maybe not.
My younger techy son, no longer a kid, says maybe we can do a data recovery. Okay… but he says avoid using the external hard-drive until he can get to it. WHAT? I can’t access my draft blogs and my thousands of cool photos from all years except 2013? Well, fudge and phooey. So here I write, apologetically to the world (or at least to my friends) about my foul-up that may have messed up time as we know it. Much like the Secret Service “inadvertently” deleting texts regarding January 6, I have inadvertently deleted a whole year. It does make you wonder what the Secret Service was up to in 2013… now we may never know.
Michelle Eames 