It just happens

[098] ... [Technology]

There was this old joke about a father explaining the greatness and powers of God to do just about anything to his little son. A bit confused at that age to grasp, the son innocently asked "Can he put back half the tube of toothpaste I just squeezed out?".

It happened to me once when trying to move an extracted setup folder with huge contents nestled under multiple subfolders to an external drive. Midway the operation stopped saying some system files in use can't be moved. Ended up with a mess, not knowing which remained and which got deleted. As the original zip file was deleted long back, the only way was to re-download or get it from someone else. Unnecessarily what had remained on the disk for so long was lost. Copying and then safely deleting the source could have been better, but who knew? Now that it's known, I am careful.

It keeps happening in other ways. You delete a duplicate file only to find the other copy is corrupted. You delete a file locally, preferring to keep the same online since having sent it as a mail attachment, and later while cleaning the unwanted messages, include this as well by mistake.

You cut the contents of a text file done temporarily and close it without saving, to insert into a mail or an existing file -- a call from someone or a desktop notification interrupts, you copy something else by mistake while right-clicking before pasting the contents, and the whole thing is gone. Unless you remember it all in entirety, the redo often doesn't live up to the original.

Rather than clicking the Save button, you prefer pressing Ctrl-S, and unknowingly combine with Z, and move over to some other process, sure of having saved.

It was beginning to get dark one evening, being lazy enough to get up & switch on the lights, preferred to work with reduced light from the window, though the all black laptop keyboard was proving difficult to find the right key. By habit I pressed Print screen going by the approximate location, only to realize it was the Power button, with the OS started shutting down promptly.

Surely we all have gone through such self inflicted digital mishaps, mostly on days when one is either feeling jittery or when the matter is most important. If you haven't, please accept my congratulations...