dira | ballad of karina and mark pierre

In July of 2001, I was studying abroad in England, at St. Peter's College, Oxford. I lived in a building called 'New Building' and it had these door locks that no one could ever lock or unlock on the first try, so one night when I was headed down to the common room to watch a movie ("Pretty Woman") with some friends, I left the door unlocked. When I got back, my laptop (her name was Karina) was gone, and along with her, about two years of writing, none of it backed up. I cried hysterically that night. It was my fault that I'd lost everything, twice over; I'd left the door unlocked, and I'd failed to do backups.

I bought my new laptop, Mark Pierre, with the money from the insurance claim. I was always careful about theft danger, and I did backups religiously. Well, semi-religiously. Well. Fairly regularly, anyway. When I remembered. But, no big deal, nothing bad was going to happen to Mark Pierre. I had learned my lesson, after all.

Yesterday, when I headed to my parents' house, I took Mark Pierre along - thinking I might do some writing, or at least get the new little story I'd written from my computer to my parents', and post it.

At best guess, so far, what happened is that when I picked up a random disk off my parents' computer desk instead of going upstairs to grab my own from my backpack, I infected Mark Pierre with bootmonkey. At the moment, even with the recovery disk, Mark Pierre doesn't seem to be reading the C drive at all. I can't get into BIOS. I can't get anything at all except 'I/O Disk Error.' I haven't done backups in weeks.

I feel sick. I want to cry. And I can't fight the feeling that this is, once again, all my own fault.