It's an ill wind...

I always like to think that I'm a glass-half-full type of chap, the sort that tries to look on the bright side. People with a positive outlook on life are always so much better company than the doomsayers, aren't they? Of course, adopting a positive approach is not always easy. Take my experience yesterday, for example.

As my regular reader knows, I am a member of Brighton Lions Club and produce the monthly newsletter, Jungle Jottings. The next issue, September's, is due to be published next weekend - a little early because of a time-important notice. I was congratulating myself on having it all ready apart from the minutes of the business meeting to be held next week which would be easy enough to slot in provided they could be kept to the size of the vacant slot. You are probably ahead of me now and thinking, 'Pride goes before a fall'. Spot on. The treasurer had earlier sent me the draft receipts and payments account for the Charity Trust Fund which I had included. The he rang to say he had discovered an error and could I hold off on publishing the figures? The difference was only £19 and, given that our income for the year was in excess of £70,000 I didn't think that would make much difference, but Tony is a stickler for accuracy in financial matters so I agreed to pull the accounts. It was no real problem as I had something else up my sleeve which would pretty well fill the newly empty slot.

But before I could pull the accounts I had another phone call telling me that one of our members had died suddenly. This, I knew, meant that I would have to fiddle around with things to get in a notice about Derek.

So I tried to open the file, only to discover that it had somehow been corrupted and my word processor software didn't recognise it. Nor did any other software. Besides, checking the properties of the corrupted file showed that it had lost most of its contents as the size was ridiculously small. However, all was not lost. I have a separate hard drive and the computer is programmed to back up new and altered files on a daily basis. All I had to do was restore the file from the back up drive. Unfortunately, that didn't work either. There seemed to be a problem with the restoration part of the software. OK, try a different way. Find the back up copy, copy it and paste onto the main computer. That was when I found that the back up was a copy of the corrupted file! I had to start from scratch, redrafting and retyping everything.

So, you might ask, where is the silver lining in that cloud? Well, there are actually two:

1. The September issue of Jungle Jottings looks better than it first did; and
2. I am now aware of a problem in the back up program so I will take steps to back up daily a different way.

And Tony now tells me that the accounts he sent me are OK for publication so I'll get back into the word processor and play around again.