chest pains

I had a heart attack today. You know when you have that brief moment of realization that you've made a very big, irreversible mistake with dire consequences? When air stops passing through your lungs and you have to tell yourself to breathe again?

That was me today.

So my boss is leaving for Korea this weekend for a coordination meeting for our next submission. Which meant that ALL the mechanical drawings had to be updated and all the calculations checked and confirmed. On top of that, my boss was moving from his corner cube to an office today - 20 something years of built up papers all had to be sorted, tossed, and transported to the new location. Luckily (or unluckily) I was not the one to clean out his crap - I was too busy going through file after file, making the same changes over and over again.

So all this haste led me to around 2pm, when he finally told me to give up and just get MIS (the computer people) to make all the files we had into a CD for him to take. So I create a "CD" folder on the network, and proceed to dump all of our mechanical files into it. I get an error message that some files couldn't be moved because someone had them open.

So then I run around, trying to figure out who in my zoo of coworkers left files open. I forgot which exactly they were, so I decided to just wipe the "CD" folder and re-copy the files over, all at once. Had to make sure I didn't miss anything. So I cleared out the folder. Went back to the original directory...

It was empty. EMPTY. In one fell swoop of the mouse, I had just deleted EVERY mechanical file we had on this project.

This is where my heart stopped.

After something unintelligible came out of my mouth (something like "this-is-bad-this-is-very-very-baaaaaaaaad") I immediately picked up my phone and called MIS and frantically told what had happened, with a desperate plea if they could recover the files in some sort of backup process.

At that moment, my boss comes by and decides to hover over my shoulder and ask me if the CD was done yet. He kept insisting that he needed it ASAP, while I tried to wave him off - hello, there are currently NO files to save.

Luckily, they back up the system periodically. Unfortunately, the best they could do were the files from 2 hours ago - so all my work after lunch was gone. But far be it for me to complain - at least the blood was pumping through my heart again.

My coworkers that sit on my left and right were very amused by this whole incident and my reactions to it.