Teaching A Cat To Bark

Not wishing to mince my words I'm having the shittiest of days.

Actually it began yesterday.

Nope not true. It was really Wednesday night when it began but. at that point, I had no idea what was about to unfold.

And . . . ever since yesterday afternoon, I've had a couple of Byron Katie quotes going through my mind about "arguing with reality".

Because that's what I've been doing, with a vengeance.

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On Wednesday night I closed my computer down and Windows updated.

On Thursday morning Windows wouldn't load.
I tried to open in Safe Mode. No longer an option.
I tried to go back to an earlier restore point. There weren't any.
In fact, I followed all the suggestions I could find but nothing worked.

I decided to take my laptop to a local computer repair shop after phoning them and being told they already had 5 that had been brought in that morning and they thought it would take about 2 hours to get to mine.

Four hours later they told me it was done, showed it to me and asked if it looked OK to which I replied I wouldn't really know until I started to use it.

I paid the bill and went to a cafe just up the road to try it out.
First thing I found is that all my photos had been deleted.

I went back to the shop in the hope that they had downloaded them somewhere but they said that the folder was empty when they reinstalled Windows.

"What? You reinstalled Windows" I cried.

"Yes", they said.

Bloody hell, they'd only gone and wiped the whole of my hard drive without asking me if that was OK or warning me they might have to do that!!! 😱

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I'm now going to add a pretty flower picture here in an effort to cheer myself up before I continue with the story! 😢

Might take a while. I'll have to find and download one from my Google account . . .

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Back to the nightmare story . . .

For some reason they backed up my documents and my desktop but not my photographs or my music.

I probably have backups of most of the photos in one place or another but I've just spent the last 6 months sorting them and editing them.
I've been putting them into folders so I could find them more easily and I'd organised them in such a way that I knew which ones I'd used and which I hadn't in my Steemit posts.

Before I did this, I was spending inordinate amounts of time trying to find photographs I wanted to use.

I've run some restoration software overnight but so far, the files I've found, won't open despite their being in "excellent" condition. I googled it and apparently even if a file has been found and not overwritten there is no guarantee that it can be successfully restored.

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In the meantime I am still in the phase of "arguing with reality". I can't quite face that this has really happened and that, I suspect, I will simply have to give up at some point and start again with the downloading and organising.

I know that it helps not one iota to keep fuming about it and feeling sorry for myself but I just can't seem to help it.

Sometimes we are our own worst enemies.

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Wine, chocolates, upvotes and resteems will all be gratefully received by poor, poor moir! 😢 😂