That's Not a Ghost, That's a Guy in a Red Shirt! And He's Got My Laptop!

Ok... To whoever controls the ways of the universe: When I said that it was gonna be an eventful weekend, I was just being sarcastic, ok?

That being said, I'm absolutely gutted.

Saturday, ~1:30 AM: I got home, went up to the computer room and left my backpack on the chair where I always put it. After that, I went to my room, watched some tv, listened to some music, and then went to sleep.

Same day, ~9:00 AM: My dad woke me up and I had breakfast with my parents and sister. It's been a long time since we all had breakfast together, or for that matter, a Saturday morning together. We were heading to the province, which is why my parents were in Las Piñas, and my sister and I were awake before lunch on a weekend. Anyway, after I finished my breakfast, I went up to the computer room again, and took my cellphone, which I left inside my backpack. The phone's batt was dead, so I took it to another room and charged it. I went back to bed while waiting for my mom to finish using the bathroom.

~10:30 AM: After much prodding from my parents, I got up from bed and took a bath, then I went straight up to my room, got dressed and started packing my stuff.

~11:30 AM: I went down to the computer room to grab my laptop and digicam. I wanted to bring my laptop so that I could watch some movies and tv shows on a decent screen (because there was no cable TV in my parents' house in Quezon.) When I got there, my backpack (which doubles as my laptop bag) was gone from its homey chair. I asked my parents if they've seen it, or if they knew where it was. Of course, they didn't. I suspected that my dad just mistakenly loaded my backpack to the van together with all the things we were bringing to Quezon. So I checked, but the backpack wasn't there either. I checked my room, hoping that I brought it up there, and I just totally forgot that I did for some reason (someone else moving my things, short term memory loss, early signs of Alzheimer's, sleepwalking or other sleep-induced movement, I was willing to go for any reason...) But it still wasn't there.

My backpack, and everything in it including my laptop and its peripherals (geeky word, I know), my cam, my favorite brown jacket, my company ID, and important office stuff, was gone.

Apparently, when my mom was in their room getting ready, she saw, from the reflection in the mirror, someone in red coming out of the computer room. She didn't mind it thinking that it was just me, or it was just something she imagined (some friends have claimed that they see ghosts in our house, so we've gotten used to ignoring things that seem to move out of the corner of our eyes.) Also, apparently, my parents forgot to lock the door to our kitchen after they loaded all our things in the van. And apparently, our neighbor saw a guy in red taking a peek into the screen door of their house, surveying what's inside. Our neighbor locked the door when he saw what the guy was doing and the guy left.

Apparently, the guy in red was a robber, and he went into our house and from right under our noses took the easiest thing he could take: my backpack with my cam, and my favorite brown jacket, and my 3 month-old laptop containing all my work files and important emails, most of which have no backup copy. Lucky bastard.


As I said, I'm absolutely fucking gutted. And pissed and annoyed and depressed.


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Now playing: Modest Mouse - Parting of the Sensory
via FoxyTunes

Battered but not bruised

It was hell week in the office. Our team was in crisis mode as we tried to clean up the big mess that fell comfortably on our laps. Since we deal with applications on production environment (meaning it's already being used by the customers for their day-to-day operations), everything and anything that doesn't go right (whether it was our fault or not) is critical and must be resolved immediately and in a sense, every passing minute is a deadline.

I’ve also just recently recovered from a crisis of my own. If you’ve been reading some of my previous posts, you may know that my laptop crashed. I lost my files and had no access to my email, which is extremely frustrating because I rely so much on emails for a huge chunk of my work.

The good news is (after almost a month of despair,) my laptop is now back up to working again, finally! But now my next tasks are to sort through a back log of more than a thousand emails, and try to recover/recreate my files. Of course, in these bad times, Murphy’s Law never ceases to succeed. The people in IT support were able to recover some of my files. The ones that they weren’t able to recover were files that I put under the category “Important”. (I’m not blaming them though, my hard disk crashed, and that’s not their fault.) I’m just trying to roll with the punches the best I can.

The weather’s been really nice lately. It’s not too sunny even in the afternoons and the temp has really dropped to lower than usual; I don’t even have to use the electric fan all that much.

Why am I talking about the weather? Something about silver linings and all that.