Crash Boom Bang

My poor laptop threw a bit of a pink fit today... well actually it's been experiencing more of a gradual decline, but apparently Matilda finally did something which caught someone's attention @ work - gotta love the bloody network police. Anyway I've been in pretty effective denial about the impending crisis, so when the IT guy asked me to hand over the errant machine this morning, I did a frantic double take.

I beg your pardon? You want to go through the contents of my laptop? Holy Mother of God... ummm, give me a minute.

Now it's not like I have a veritable cache of porn, or detailed bomb-making instructions hidden within my personal files, but I do have a heck of a lot of musical bits and bytes, and an Outlook folder chocka block with hard copy evidence of a fairly healthy email habit. As you can probably guess, the former wasn't entirely appropriated legally & as for the latter... well quite a few illegal happenings are probably described within... *ahem*

But back to my mission (impossible) - 5 minutes to make my hard drive PG rated or I'm disavowed and thigh high in the stinky brown stuff. Lucky for me, pressure is one of my good friends, so I put on the 'woman possessed' head & went to work - programs flew out the door, folders were unceremoniously dumped, music culled, memory wiped, history erased, shots censored, hidden files ferreted out & flayed... someone tell Arnie there's a new Terminator in town baby.

Can't say I'm super pleased to have lost all that digital booty, but at least I'm fairly confident I won't be hauled in to face some rather tricky questions when I return from hols. Lesson learnt: buy 2nd hard drive immediately and regularly backup naughty stuff to non-'you have discretion over my wages' related location!