AKA – I’m a writer, so I have an excuse.

This morning was a horrible and tragic morning for me. The kind of morning where even the sugar-free, vanilla-raspberry, iced coffee couldn’t make the world a better place. I sobbed, and the tears splattered my keyboard, and I was grateful that I get into the office early so my coworkers couldn’t witness this shameful display of sorrow.

It all started when I plugged my USB drive into my computer. This is the USB drive that has everything important on it. My tax information, my query spreadsheet. My Writing. All of it. The last two years worth of work.

And normally, I plug in my best-plastic-friend, and Windows asks me if I want to examine the files on the drive. Except this morning, it didn’t. Instead it told me the drive was empty and I needed to format it if I wanted to use it.

!!! *sob* Not my writing! NOOO! What am I going to do? My life is over? How can I ever go on? Do I have any copies anywhere I can recover? I’ve sent drafts to readers lately, along with notes of the changes I wanted to make. Can I recover the last week’s worth of work from that? Do I need to recover more than that? How will I recreate my query list? How long will I spend sifting through my sent mail to figure that out?

I was so distraught that I posted a very brief (unthinkable. They asked me if I got the problem resolved.

*sigh*

So here’s what actually happened. I plugged the drive in, Windows said it was blank and needed to be formatted, and I said “huh, that kinda sucks. Well, at least I backed all my writing up last night like I almost always do so I didn’t lose anything.” And then I unplugged the drive and plugged it back in and it worked fine.

Really, the trauma lasted all of about no seconds, and it took me less than a minute to figure out it was even less impressive than that.

But there’s no story in that.

And I’m a story teller.

So it made me wonder, should I come with a disclaimer? I ask this because I will occasinally get a message from a friend, or be talking to a coworker, and they’ll say ‘how are you’ (and mean it as opposed to just passing off the obligatory greeting), and I’ll say something like “I’ve been better, but I have so much to do today and I don’t know how I’ll ever survive and when will I even have time to breathe? And OMG! If that guy in architectural design says one more thing to me while I have this headache, I might just scream!”

And apparently when most people say this, they mean it. I think in my case (though I’m not certain), the writer in me just likes to inject a little melodrama into my own world.

Because if someone says to me ‘how are you today?’ and I say “I have a lot to do, but I’ve got a list and a good handle on it so it’s no big deal.”

Where’s the fun in that? Why would they ask me again tomorrow if there was no story there?

I think I’m going to have to go ponder the psychological implications of this a little further.

Do you ever enahnce stories of your own every-day to garner an audience? Do you do it consciously or is it something that just happens?