A cautionary tale

Patty here…

Good crime fiction ratchets up the tension at every turn of the page. Life must get progressively worse and more dangerous for our heroes and heroines until the pressure becomes unbearable. Just when you think they’ve hit rock bottom, something really bad happens. We call it upping the stakes.

This week while my foot was turning banana yellow and the air brace on my sprained ankle was making my toes numb, my stakes got seriously upped.

My Web site disappeared into the ether.

The guy who hosted the site on his server died some weeks back. It was sad because he’d handled all of the computers in my life for as long as I can remember. He also protected me from spam and hackers. His company was sold. I stayed with the new guy. A week ago I stopped getting email. I called to find out why. No response. I tried again. And again. Nobody called me back for four days.

To make a long story short, my friend died without leaving a password to get into the server where my Web site lived. His spam-busting routing system was so complicated that none of the so-called experts called in to solve the problem could figure out what he’d done or how to access my files. So why is it we didn't have guys like him looking for those weapons of mass destruction?

Nobody has a back up of my site, not even me, mostly because I don’t know how to back up a Web site and had no idea I should even be worried about that. In an instant, my site was wiped out—all the text I’d written, every link, every photo, and every review quote I’d accumulated for the past four years. Every everything. Oh sure, I can reconstruct most of it from scratch, but it’s going to take me days if not weeks. My Web site now lives in some quirky time capsule where it will stay forever—alone and inaccessible unless somebody figures out how to break it out. Maybe I'll start a new movement: FREE WWW.PATRICIASMILEY.COM. We'll have rallies and hand out some of Miss C's bumper stickers. It's 8 p.m. Do you know where your Web site is?

Luckily, my Web designer, the fabulous Maddee James, saved my bacon (as Our J always says) by restoring my email and agreeing to host the newly reconstructed site. Whew!

Paulie, who’s a funny guy with a vivid imagination, predicts this tale will find its way into a book one day. I hope it’s one of his. Along with all the thrills and chills his writing offers, I'd welcome some of his signature humor right now.

This whole episode got me thinking about the material things I’ve lost, sold, or given away but wish I had back.

1. My Web site
2. My parent's Royal manual typewriter
3. My green gauze culottes (but only until summer’s over)
4. My sense of humor

Got anything you want to add to the list?

Happy Monday!

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