There is a special hell just for programmers

I know what the hell looks like, because I visited it today.

I have an e-commerce site due to be demo-ed to the client tomorrow. He is then going to do a presentation to a national sales conference on Friday.

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I was beavering away this morning, getting stuff done. I had one bit left to do – rebuild the search results so it looks a bit better on a desktop or tablet.

Ok, so deep breath, ready to code…

Suddenly the hard drive with the site on it disappeared. No warning, no nothing. It was just no longer there. I have backups of course, but they are a couple of days old. I don’t have a couple of days to repeat the work I’ve already done.

Problem solving 101 – reboot the machine and see if the drive comes back. No worries.

The machine reboots and then hangs on the startup screen. WTF!!

By now my heart rate was in the good cardio range. That’s my new 3 terrabyte drive dead, and now my machine won’t even boot. Time to rip open the case and get in it up to my elbows, and cause some carnage.

I removed the drive and tried rebooting the machine. This time it started up. Oh the relief! When it was finished booting up, I jumped on Skype and told the boss what was up. He was very cool about it and told everyone else I was in programmer hell, so they wouldn’t bother me for a bit.

I tried putting the drive back in and rebooting. Still stuck on the startup screen, but at least I knew that if I took the drive back out, I could get back up and running. But that didn’t solve the issue of all my work being blown away. Not to mention all the photos I took over the weekend at my godson’s birthday party, or the photos and video I took of the search dogs in action last night.

I figured the hard drive was dead. It was still under warranty as I only put it in a month or so ago. So I decided to take it into the shop and see if they could recover any data from it.

Before doing that I needed a shave, as I looked like crap (and felt like it too). So I did that, and I allowed me a few moments to gather my thoughts a bit.

I had tried swapping one of the cables on the drive to see if that fixed it, but I hadn’t swapped the other cable. That was pretty much all the options I had left. So I swapped the data cable and hit the button to turn the infernal machine on.

And bugger me – it booted right up! I had my data back!

I quickly backed it all up to a removable drive, and then stopped for a cup of tea while my heart rate moved out of the fat burning zone, and down to a level that is less likely to give me a heart attack.

This whole visit to hell cost me about two hours of work time. So it was head down and fingers on the keyboard, trying to catch up and get things finished on time.

I finally got it done. It was a bit later than I had hoped, but at least we can go to the client tomorrow with a product.

So if you see a wee man, with a fed face and veins popping out, wild eyed and cursing softly over and over, you’ll know where he’s been. Be nice to him. Make him a soothing cup of tea, and don’t mind his gibberish. He’ll soon be fine. Either he’ll have a heart attack and die, or some miracle will happen to get him out of hell, singed but alive.