Dear LPG

I decided to write something that I felt LPG readers needed to hear yesterday and I was quite impressed with myself when I had finished the message.  I will put that down as a separate post but want to focus on the actual writing of it at the moment.  While writing, I was distracted by a telephone call.  When that happens I usually press the ‘save’ icon at the top of the screen and I thought I had before getting into a rather lengthy conversation with an old friend.

By the time we had finished the computer's screen saver was the only thing showing on the monitor and I knew that all I would have to do is touch the mouse pad to get a renewed view of all the writings I had been working on. 

I remember finishing the call and then deciding to work on a bit of maths which involved my getting into a spread sheet and i was soon immersed with that.

Later in the day I decided to send my LPG message, but when I went to the computer and tried to find it, it was nowhere to be seen and I was heartbroken.  For those who don’t use their computers to write documents it is rather like discovering that you dropped a stitch ten rows ago when knitting, doing your homework with pen and paper back in the day and then spilling ink all over it or remembering that you have forgotten to add the salt when you have finished boiling the potatoes.

I spent lots of time trying to find my work without success but while it felt really upsetting to have lost all that work, doing it again was easier because, once I got back into it, all those recently processed ideas came back to me almost immediately.

Most computers save your work automatically now but mine is quite old and sometimes doesn’t bother.  Once I had got over the realisation that it had gone forever even though I was so sure that I had saved my letter, it was lots easier to do it again.

I think that my little story offers a really fundamental moral and that is: -no matter what you are doing and how detailed any lost project was, there is no point in lamenting over it; you would do better to spend that energy getting it done again.   As they say ‘there is no point in crying over spilt milk’.

The sooner you get started again, the sooner you will finish again and I will be sending the new version of my original LPG thought very soon.

WS, Crofton Park

LPG thought that these links might help the point to hit home…

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