Panic weekend

It was a three-day weekend. A good time for catching up on sleep. I haven’t been getting much lately, because I usually work until 10 or 11 and then do an additional two or three hours of work once I get home. This book translation is going to wreck me even as it makes me rich and famous. It’s also too damn hot to sleep . . . It almost hit 40 degrees in Tokyo the other day, an all-time record for the city (which means that it was actually 43 or 44 in some parts of this concrete oven), and at night the temperature didn’t drop under 30 one night. Combine that with the normal humidity you get in a Japanese summer and you get people actually suffering heat stroke in their beds. Several folks have already died in their sleep this summer.

Anyway, on Friday I taught my last translation class. I stuck around in Shinjuku for a couple hours after that, and got on the train at about eleven and headed home and crashed. On Sunday evening I went to grab the PowerBook out of my backpack so I could upload the work the students did in class to my website . . . and the computer wasn’t there.

Doh.

I tore my work room apart. I looked under sofas and chairs and in the closet and out on the porch and down in the basket of my bicycle. I started calling train stations and the restaurant we had gone to on Friday. It was late in the evening and lots of these places were no longer taking calls, so on Monday I headed out into the heat, visiting the train stations and police stations and filing reports everywhere I went. Headed back to Shinjuku and asked at all the places I’d been that night. No luck. I was now looking at:
– The loss of a computer that cost me 270,000 when I bought it
– The need to replace it with a bunch more money
– The need to go online and change all my webmail and website passwords, along with my mail account info
– The cancellation of my credit cards (who knows what data is in that machine?)
– The loss of a hell of a lot of digital photos that hadn’t been backed up onto another drive
– General malaise

So the weekend turned out to be less than restful. Not much sleep. At least I avoided sweating to death in my futon, I guess.

12" G4But joy! On Tuesday morning we were awoken by a call from a Musashi Koganei station guy who told us that a bag matching my description was sitting in the Mitaka station lost-and-found. A quick stop at platform 1 on the way to work that morning, and the computer was back in my arms . . . Dead battery, since it had been sleeping when I saw it last, but rebootable and intact.

What a relief that was . . . All those tasks I was not looking forward to doing no longer needed, and all that money that was going to go toward a new iBook (couldn’t really justify a faster PowerBook when I’d thrown the last one away like that) still in my pocket. Joy!

Let this be a lesson to me . . . I will never carry this computer in its own little bag when I have a backpack to keep track of as well. Computer in protective case, case in backpack, pack on back. I suppose I could look into a pair of handcuffs to lock the thing to my wrist, too.

07/22/2004 | life | Comments

3 Responses to “Panic weekend”

  1. Posted by: Fallen_62 - 07/27/2004

    silly durf! you must keep that stuff in your sight at all times! you’re lucky you got it back, and the people in japan seem to be a lot more honest than people in America… if some1 had found it here, it woulda been gone.

  2. Posted by: Quicksilver - 07/29/2004

    Nice one Durf ;) But since we all blame you when something goes wrong, who did you blame for losing your computer like that? ^^

  3. Posted by: ricrestoni - 07/30/2004

    Way to go, D’ohrf!

    But as I read it, your D2 stash was not among your most urgent concerns. HOW IS THAT? TREASON!

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