The Vanishing

For the second time in the history of this site, the draft message that contained all the ideas I had for future posts—in the neighborhood of 400+ post ideas—was somehow deleted. And I say “somehow” because I guess I deleted it, but I have no memory of doing such a thing. And deleting draft messages is not something I regularly do, so I can’t see myself doing it on autopilot. But hey, what’s done is done.

But here’s a note to my google-employed readers, of which I know I have a few: What’s the rush to make my draft message vanish from the face of the fucking earth? Why doesn’t it go to the trash where I can recover it should something like this occur? If I delete a message from Old Navy telling me of their Wacky for Khaki Summer Sale, I have 30 days to ruminate, second guess myself, change my mind and retrieve it from the trash. Do I really want to get rid of this meaningless junk mail informing me of their BOGO sale on mid-rise board shorts? Well, don’t worry, because I have a goddamned lunar cycle to mull it over.

But if—mistakenly, or in a moment of pique—you delete that draft love letter you’ve been working on for 6 weeks to that woman you’ve been pining over for two decades, or that draft of a letter of reconciliation between you and your father that you’ve been carefully crafting since his cancer diagnosis, or that draft of your revised will, or that draft of 400 blog post ideas… well, you’re fucked. It’s been <GLORPED!> into the void. Vanishing like a dream. Without so much as a, “Are you sure you’d like to delete this draft?” Which is strange because I would suggest that, on average, people’s drafts are more important to them than whatever random emails they happen to receive (and which they have a month to retrieve if they get deleted).

That being said, I don’t blame Google. Even if it was some sort of bug or random quirk. I should have had a better system in place. Especially since it happened to me once before. I now do have a better system. Well, better in the sense of “less likely to have everything disappear.” It’s mildly less convenient, but that’s the trade-off I guess.

I’m not worried about the lost post ideas. This incident happened back in mid-April. Of the approximately 400 or so that were lost, I was able to remember a couple hundred over the course of the next few days. Another 100 were probably stupid or ones I was never going to get to anyway. 50 more will probably come back to me in time. (One way you can help: If you sent me an email about something and I said, “I’ll cover this on the site sometime,” or something along those lines, feel free to write in and remind me about it, because it may have been one of the ones that slipped my mind.) So that accounts for most of them.

The only thing I’m mildly bummed about is that there were definitely some ideas in there that were just brief flashes of inspiration that I’ll probably never remember/think of again, and they may have been the sort of thing that would grow into something worthwhile.

Oh well! It doesn’t matter. I’ll come up with better ideas than the ones that were lost.

Have a good weekend.