Let me be clear. The purpose of this post is to bitch and moan. Well, that and to wallow in my own stupidity and bad karma. It’s a brief story, at least I intend it to be.

Last Friday was as good or bad as any other. I had planned on doing some hard drive partition juggling on my laptop in advance of getting the new 1 TB eSata/usb/firewire drive I had ordered mid-week. In fact, to my surprise it arrived in my office Friday afternoon. Being the cheeky monkey I am, I decided to boot up my laptop, fire up a GParted live CD and let it do its magic while I worked away the afternoon.

This is when things went horribly wrong.

You see, it’s always best to make sure your laptop is running on AC power when you do anything important that will run for any significant length of time. You’d have to be a few bricks short of a full load to do anything different. So when I heard the laptop on the desk behind me shut off with nary a warning beep, my heart sank. Or more accurately, it drove off a cliff.

Luckily I had backed up my laptop’s home directory a couple of nights earlier in preparation for the partitioning re-org. I did however lose my aptly named ‘/creative’ partition where I temporarily stored most of my photos and videos between periodic backups to my older USB2.0 drive. They were scattered to the wind.

However, my poor organizational habits came to my rescue in one way. I still had 25GB of photos and videos on my Canon 7D’s CF card that spanned back to just before Christmas. So I managed to pay very little for my stupidity.

Until Saturday that is.

My daughter and I pulled into the Best Buy parking lot early Saturday afternoon. I needed to see if they had a PCI or AGP video card for my Dad’s desktop (he had recently bought a 22” monitor and his existing card didn’t support the native resolution). My daughter was watching videos on my Nexus One when we parked. So I told her to shut it off and stick it in her pocket while we went in. (Why didn’t I take the phone from her?? I have no idea - this is the way stupidity works people!).

We went in, didn’t find anything other than PCI-E cards (slots which his 5 yr old PC doesn’t have) and then spent about 5 or 10 minutes looking at the DSI-XL, and various other tech toys. So 10 minutes later we’re driving out of the parking lot and I ask her for the phone. WE CAN’T FIND IT.

We did all the usual things. Searched our pockets five times over. Searched the car five times over. Looked in the store. Searched the parking lot. Re-traced our steps. Talked to the store rep who called the number while my daughter and I ran around trying to listen for a ringtone. Nada (he said it went straight to voicemail).

My daughter in tears, swimming in guilt. Me, biting back my anger, telling her (and knowing inside) it was Daddy’s stupidity. Walking back to the car in disbelief, eyes desperately darting everywhere looking for a little black neoprene case in a snowy slushy parking lot full of moving cars, the sinking realization hitting home that my beloved Nexus One was gone. Worse still, taking with it a surprising amount of photos and videos that I had only backed up about 3 months ago when I upgraded from a 4GB to an 8GB microSD card.

After getting back home, changing my gmail password, and making some fumbling attempts at figuring out how to locate it, I finally resigned myself to its loss, wishing hopefully that it had been crushed under the weight of a car tire and not in the hands of someone else. After some short deliberation, I headed back out to bite the bullet and get a new phone.

I ended up getting a Samsung Galaxy S. I’ll probably have more posts on how I’m liking (or not liking) the new phone. I’ll save those for another time. But I will leave you with a heavily abbreviated list of things I came to learn this weekend:

1. I am stupid.
2. Backup your stuff. You don’t need some streamlined system. Just backup your stuff. Somewhere.
3. Bell mobility staff (at least in the Aurora store I went to) is heavily undertrained on what they’re selling.
4. Telus mobility staff are somewhat better trained, but still surprisingly clueless about what they’re selling.
5. Think past your rage and avoid blaming a nine-year old for the stupidity of her 42 year old father.
6. Keeping most all of my graphic design work in Dropbox was about the only smart thing I’ve done through all this.
7. The Nexus One was an even more beautiful phone than I thought it was. If you have one, keep it. Cherish it. AKA you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone.
8. Plug in your laptop when you’re doing any important system work.
9. Web sync’d apps of any kind are a godsend.
10. BACK. UP. YOUR. STUFF. SOMEWHERE. ANYWHERE.
11. I am stupid.