jakorte's blog

I found a forgotten tale while going through more office files last week: “Always Wear a Slip.”
I was so excited to have such an old piece reemerge, that I thought I might add it to this week’s blog message.

I quickly saved it to my desktop and continued on my shredding journey.
Tearing apart plastic disks and slipping the cute little true-to-name floppy-disky part into the shredder was fun, and somewhat therapeutic. Purposefully destroying something under the guise of spring cleaning, making garbage, and de-cluttering the office, translates into a pretty good time for me.

Quite a bit later, I had the remarkable luck to find myself in that precarious daylight savings time mythical hour.
Ironically, my phone woke me up with a text message politely reporting it had very considerately updated my phone clock so I wouldn’t have to lose any sleep over it.

Since deep sleep had already slipped away, I decided to get a jump on the newsletter.
I clicked on the cute desktop short-cut item only to have my nefarious computer insistently repeat “Insert a floppy disk into drive A.” Huh? I had checked the file to make sure it saved. I had closed it and opened it, and it was there. However, as I stared blankly at the no longer cute but rather taunting icon, I realized the sad truth. Of course it had been there, because I had checked it while the disk was still active. I hadn’t created a back-up file, just a shortcut requiring the disk.

“Always Wear a Slip” was lost. Slipped; from an over 15 year old floppy disk by way of my fingers through a very thorough grinding machine.

I can’t accurately recreate the exact wording even though I read it just a day ago.
But, the moral of that story was of course to always wear a slip, because badly embarrassing issues can result if you don’t take that precaution.
The sub-moral was to make sure that you always follow the advice you give.

The moral of the above story is to remind those few remaining folks who are still using archaic floppies to check your back up file after you remove the disc.
The sub-moral is to make sure that you always follow the advice you give.

In this issue: Disk vs. Disc; Slips, Slipped Disks,
Now Posted: New Orleans, Oct 2009: Action Plan: Papering/Liability
Humor, That’s Random: Always Wear a Slip