Last Wednesday, I lost it. In more ways than one. My accounting software crashed and I lost all of my company files- my inventory, employee payroll, customer list, all sales transactions from the last ten years- all of it was gone. I had been backing up the company files to an external hard drive intermittently, but the last saved version I had was from May. Still, it was at least something. But as I was loading that backup file, the external drive crashed as well, and suddenly I couldn’t access anything. As of 2:34 p.m. last Wednesday, my business was gone in the blink of an eye. And once that realization hit me, I melted down. As I dissolved into a puddle of frustration and tears, I thought to myself, “I can’t do this. I don’t have the strength.” I wanted to lock the door, leave, and never look back.
I allowed myself those few moments of despair and a good hard cry, but then realized something- no one else can fix this for me. It’s a strange and scary thing that happens when we reach a certain level of self-sufficiency and responsibility: you realize you are in charge of what happens next. And I knew I could either sit on the floor feeling sorry for myself, or I could take one baby step toward finding a solution. So I took that step. And what do we do when the going gets tough? Call for reinforcements. First, I called my dad, who also happens to be my accountant. Through tears, I explained what had happened and tried to keep the panic out of my voice, but he could hear it, and immediately went into Dad Mode. He told me to find someone to look at the hard drives and try to recover the data, and told me not to worry about going back and re-entering anything just yet, but to “just keep really good track of everything from today forward.” Somehow that seemed manageable enough to get me moving in the right direction. Next, I called the closest IT guy I could find- who was a block up the street. I left everything in his hands (i.e. dumped the only complete digital record of my entire business onto his counter, useless as it was), went back to my shop, and decided the only thing left to do was to sit down at my (thankfully still operating smoothly) Mac and attempt to get some design work done. At least that was something I could control today. So for the next few hours I did a handful of proofs, answered a bunch of emails, and left work feeling emotionally hungover and tentatively optimistic. Maybe tomorrow would bring good news.
It didn’t. Nothing could be recovered from either drive. As it dawned on me that I was actually going to have to rebuild everything from scratch, I struggled to push the panic out of my mind that kept wanting to creep in, screaming, “This can’t be done! You can’t handle this!” And there were bleak moments when I thought I couldn’t. But in order to combat those utterly debilitating thoughts, I kept pushing myself forward, one baby step at a time. Step one: breathe. Step two: stay organized and focused. Step three: breathe.
First, we took inventory of all of our products, by hand, with nothing but 15 sheets of paper, a clipboard and a pen. Old school. Second, I re-entered employee information so I could actually run payroll next week. Third, I uploaded the customer spreadsheet from Google that I thankfully had from the party we threw last month (finally, something worthwhile came from doing that direct mail piece). Fourth, I collected all the print records I could find from 2015: every tax payment, every payroll time sheet, and every single piece of printed documentation. I am living proof that print is most definitely not dead, and sometimes it actually saves our asses.
Saturday morning, I bought a new laptop, and after downloading my accounting software again, I spent hours on the phone with Quickbooks tech support (who said I would have to pay them $579 to get me back up and running, and still from scratch- they couldn’t recover any data either). No deal. I hung up, determined to figure it out, and several software updates later and a recovered payroll security key, I was at the point where I could start entering data again. A bittersweet victory, but I gladly took it.
Over the next few days, things slowly started to take shape again. The world slowly came back into focus and began to look a little more like it did before. It was missing some critical pieces, but it was manageable, and maybe in some ways even more organized at this point than it had been before The Crash. I’m pretty sure this is what is known as a “silver lining.”
And throughout the past six days, several things became apparent. I remembered that it’s possible to come out on the other side of something awful and feel stronger because of it. I reinforced the notion that I can handle the unexpected, as unpleasant as it may be at times. I may not have done it with perfect grace, but I still did it. It also became evident that there are some pretty amazing people in my life who helped pick me back up in countless other ways, even though they couldn’t bring back the data. And that emotional support was tremendous and invaluable. So after six days of dizzying data entry, little sleep, and fewer showers than I’d like to admit, I’m back- with a slightly foggy mind, a full heart… and a current company backup file in Dropbox. I can also attest to the fact that the old, somewhat annoying cliche is true: whatever doesn’t kill us does, in fact, make us stronger.
