Separation Anxiety from the Flash Drive

I usually write on my lunch hour. It’s a great system and having done it for a while now I can tell I’ve totally trained my brain to be creative between 12 and 1.

One day this week as I’m about 10 minutes from home on my way to work, I had a horrible thought. I’d left my flash drive at home. I almost had a panic attack. I thought back to everything I did that morning and knew for a fact I hadn’t grabbed it off my desk.

I texted my husband and told him. He was about 5 minutes behind me. He offered to go back and get it. But the thing is – I don’t trust my brain these days. I thought maybe there was a slight chance I had grabbed it and stuck it in my bag and I just didn’t remember.

As soon as I parked outside the office, I checked. Nope. No flash drive.

For the next few hours, my mind raced as to how I could possibly get my documents off my computer to work on them. I had separation anxiety. I was freaking out. What would I do if I couldn’t write at lunch? I would be lost. I needed to get back to my world.

I have offsite storage and the app. And after some creativity I figured out how to get the files from the backup (not the most recent but close enough) by emailing it to myself from the app. And then emailing to myself again and then saving it off.

So crisis abated. I backed up all my files that night to my hard drive and the cloud. I made sure I packed up my flash drive.

Hey at least I’m not as neurotic as Sheldon. Well…almost…