Tuesday, April 12, 2005

My husband feels so lucky...to be alive

My ISP was acting up last night and I couldn't send e-mail. Mr. Tangerine is quite computer-savvy, and he was trying to fix the problem. However, he tends to think anything that's amiss on a Mac must be the fault of Apple, so he opted to delete my e-mail account in the Mail program's preferences.

What do you know? In doing so, he deleted my in-box. Which had almost 1,200 messages. And my ISP's server had saved only the last week's worth, so I lost about 1,000 messages. Many were crap, but there were plenty I was storing in my in-box for various reasons (receipts, passwords, e-mail addresses, instructions from my freelance client, replies from authors, and heck, even a few examples of internet humor). He called the ISP a little before midnight and learned that nope, they can't get my messages back, and yep, it happens to other people.

The whole thing could have been avoided by, oh, not deleting my e-mail account. (Does that not sound catastrophic?!? And not to be entered into lightly?) Mr. Tangerine seems to feel quite chastened. I look forward to seeing how he makes it up to me. But I don't want another box of Godiva chocolates, because I have grown tired of that as the default gift (and I'd like to drop a couple pounds). And flowers don't excite me. Please share your suggestions, and I'll pass them along to my husband. Won't you please help him?

(P.S. From now on, I plan to archive things I want to keep into a zillion new folders that should reside on my hard drive. If you're like me and you warehouse a lot of crap in your in-box, you might consider doing the same.)

5 comments:

Dan said...

In our house, a spousal screw-up of that magnitude can only be expunged with a dinner out. Just the two of us, no kids. This of course rewards the guilty party as well, but it's a great excuse for a date.

Charlie said...

Oy. I'm guilty of similarly losing my wife's email. To my credit, I still claim that much of it is elsewhere in backups just waiting to be recovered (and, it is, but I can see why that doesn't earn me any extra brownie points -- indeed, it docks me several).

I know she reads this blog, and she'll see this comment, so I'm going to take this opportunity to say this: Sorry hon! I guess I owe you dinner.

thenutfantastic said...

This reason is why I find it so satisfying to be single: I can do it myself and only have myself to blame for the screw-ups.

bitchphd said...

Dinner out, your choice of venue.

You pick the movies for the next X amount of time (depending on how often you see movies).

Shoes.

Massage!!! (Actually that should be #1).

Primary parenting duty for an evening or three, of your choosing, while you get to do whatever you want, by yourself, or with a friend.

Books.

(BTW, I haven't forgotten the OC pledge--as soon as I am done with the work that is kicking my ass, I will get on it, if it isn't already too late...)

E.W.Reed said...

The dinner out option is a good idea...unless he does the cooking already, then it's just a night off for him.

I'd bet some xword books you have never solved would be a good makeup give, right?