Dragged, dropped, and done

So, I am playing around with iMovie* the other night and my Mac is running slow. Then it starts telling me that I'm running out of room. I check my hard drive and sure enough, there's less than one GB of space left on that used-to-feel-so-big 60 GB drive. Time to fiddle around a bit.

So, fiddle I do, to include copying some stuff to thumb drives. I find a nice 2 GB folder of gaming pdfs (it would be a whole library of books, I guess) and drag them onto a half-filled 8 GB Data Traveler. The transfer takes a couple of minutes; I check that it has been successful, drag the now-transferred folder to the trash, empty the trash, and check the drive again. Some memory has opened up, but it looks like the folder is still there. I check a few files, and confirm that indeed it is. Confused, I go back to the source folder. It only takes a glance to see what has happened.

I have deleted the wrong files.

You see, I had two sub-folders in "Gaming" folder. One was called RPG Source Material; that was the one I moved on to the thumb drive. The other was called RPG Desktop; that was the one I actually deleted. (Serves me right for naming them so similarly. I was always opening the wrong one when I was looking for a file; I should have known.)

Anyway, as Wonder Wife came into the room, I realized what I had done. There was no way back, no un-do, no return trip: this was "no backsies" as we used to say when trading baseball cards or bottle caps. Three or four years of my slightly OCB record-keeping of the roleplaying games I had participated in (or planned) was gone: the character sheets, maps, backstory narratives, illustrations kiped from here and there - all manner of gaming flotsam, painstakingly filed and labeled and stored - all of it vanished with one click of the mouse.

My reaction: meh.

Seriously, you can ask Wonder Wife: there were no screams of anguish, no shouted curses and obscenities, no wailing and gashing of teeth and rending of garments.  I mean, I was disappointed, of course; I have a penchant for almanacking and gazetteering and taxonomizing, and besides the archival material, there were some files in there that would have been useful in planning new campaigns. But seriously? C'mon. It was hobby junk.

No one was going to die, or lose their job, or go to jail over this. No one was going to be denied human companionship or be forced into servitude or be driven from their homeland. No one would miss a meal.

I have seen pictures of people standing in front of what used to be a home before a hurricane or tornado or earthquake had had a go at at. Everything a person owned had been reduced to flinders and rags, valueless, useless broken bits and bobs of a life, and been strewn across the landscape. It would be hard to deny that that was a real loss, but still, in the end, it was just stuff. Life goes on, and people do too, with or without the Things that We Used to Have.

Me? I had lost some files. Ephemera, really. Hemingway's wife lost a whole suitcase full of his drafts and look what happened to him.

Thirty seconds after the incident, I was back in iMovie, working away. Three or four years from now, a newly-renamed file will once again be bulging with schemes and plans and drawings and maps and characters and ideas.

Maybe I'll delete it on purpose then.

*For what I was playing with, tune in to He is a Thark tomorrow!