- Michael Sellers

The nexus where my personal and professional worlds come together is a place I like to call Macintosh HD. I have used the same Macbook since May 16th 2006, the day they were released. On this machine live countless quotes, proposals, hardware and software manuals, emails, keynote presentations, Excel spreadsheets, Chesapeake newsletter articles, utilities and tools, meeting notes, diagrams of customers infrastructure, etc. My point is, almost all of the work I have preformed in the last two and a half years of my life is stored on my beloved Macbook. But that is only the start of the used space on my hard drive. I have over 6000 songs (a thousand of them I have purchased from iTunes at about 99 cents a pop, the rest are from countless hours ripping music from my CD collection.) I have every picture of my son I have taken of him since the day he was born and the last pictures I ever took of my grandparents. I have my journal, I have the great American novel I am working on, I have a copy of the email my wife sent me ten years ago telling me she would go out on our first date. I have recipes and I have concert tickets for later this month. The value of the data on my machine can’t be measured in dollars. If it could I know there would be a lot of zeroes in it.

Two weeks ago I restarted my machine after a software update and it was at that moment my hard drive decided to fail.