Last Saturday morning I discovered my car was robbed and my personal laptop was stolen. The mass chaos that ensued (and the gross amounts of time it ate up) was:
- I said “crap” (and perhaps another word or two of a similar length) – 10 seconds
- I drove over to my office and picked up my work laptop. – 40 minutes
- I drove home and put a full days work. – 0 extra minutes
- I called my home owners insurance and got a check for a new one. – 20 minutes
- I got a new laptop. – 1.5 hours (for ordering and such)
- I installed drop box. – 10 minutes
- I let drop box sync all of my files – Overnight, no extra minutes
- I downloaded all of my old applications and reinstalled office off the – 2 hours
The entire process cost me a deductible and 4.5 hours (and 10 seconds). That’s it. I remember the days when my desktop crashing left me completely useless for weeks on end. Reinstalling software meant searching high and low for CDs and floppy disks and then waiting hours while they installed. Worst of all, reworking documents cost what seemed like years, even when my last USB backup had been a week ago. Those days are gone and I thought I would call out the people responsible:
- Drop Box: I started using it to sync files between my work laptop, my personal pcs and my home laptop but it functions great for backups too.
- Quicken, Apple, Google, Mozilla and even Microsoft: You can now download (instead of installing by CD) just about any lost piece of software. Most, like Quicken, even link your license to your username and password so you don’t have to know a CD code.
- Dell et al. for making it easy to order a new laptop quickly.
This is one of those processes that has become easier and easier as technology advanced and I didn’t notice until this week just how easy it had become. I wonder what else has gotten easier without me noticing.
