Bye bye, Miss M's files...

In our company, we often work years out on projects that may or may not materialize. There will be a flurry of activity--endless emails back and forth, contracts, diagrams, lists, letters. Then suddenly it goes dormant for months on end. Sometimes we resume it, sometimes we get an email saying "The Watkins project is off. Please give all your files to Special K."

A couple of years ago, we began work on a particularly complicated project. Many contributors, many extra facets of the budget--it was a regular pain in my ass for quite a while, but I kept painstaking records in neatly organized files. It went quiet for months, then The Boss Lady called out of the blue and asked for a particular file. "No worries!" I thought, but then opened our F drive to discover, um, Project Malaysia was gone. No sign of ANY of my Word files existed.

Now, Special K has, on occasion, accidentally moved files around. And hey, it happens. I have accidentally mucked things up before, too--I just call our computer person, D, sort it out quickly, and let anyone who might have been affected know. I debated about whether to put Special K on the spot, but after hours of searching my computer and the entire F drive, it was clear that they were gone.

So I begrudgingly trekked up to Special K's desk, and asked "Special K, do you know if there is any chance that you might have moved any of the files for Project Malaysia?" She immediately got defensive and huffy, saying no, that was none of her business and she certainly would not do anything with those files. I guess that in and of itself was a bit of a sign, so I decided to give up on trying to get a straight answer and called D instead.

D came over almost immediately, and she and I started delving into the stash of backup tapes, going back several months to finally find and recover all the files that had been lost. But in showing her the folder and what I suspected had happened, we made a startling realization. Special K was, in fact, aware of this situation well before I mentioned it to her. Special K must have deleted not only all MY files, but her own, as well. Because in a careful, methodical way, she had been retyping each document from hard-copies for the past couple of months. She still had a ways to go, but when I asked D whether we should just bring Special K up to speed and explain that we could restore them, she rolled her eyes and said, "No, if she wants that, she has to be willing to admit that she messed up."

For the next several weeks, any time I walked past her desk, she was dutifully pecking away at the keyboard with two fingers, looking back and forth between hard copies of letters and her screen. Poor Special K, I almost wanted to be helpful and tell her I understood. I never did.