Possibly the most traumatic and devastating ordeal that I will ever live through.*

Ok, so you know when you go through something traumatic and you need to debrief with someone? Well on this occasion, a couple of people is just not enough. I need to debrief with EVERYONE. Read on, and behold the horrors of my morning..

So for the last few months, I've been applying for jobs, particularly ones that use my uni degree, in the hopes of not rendering it pointless! Finally, last week, a job came up with Tourism Tasmania. I could go for it! It was a level 5! All week, I worked on the application, writing slightly over a page for each of the six selection criteria. Last night, I stayed up quite late completing it. When I eventually went to bed, all was finished except for some final proof-reading and rewording.

About five hours of sleep later, I woke up and recommenced completing the final touches. The applications were to close at 5pm today. I was just tacking a little more onto the end of criteria 3, when a dialog box popped up. From then on it's all a blur. The box read something like "Windows is losing data", followed by "error", followed by a window in which I was given a few options to deal with this error. I chose the wrong one.

Word shut down. Desperately, I reopened my USB drive and looked in the folder... Nothing. Adrian and I were chatting in MSN at the time of the disaster. I told him that I had just lost my whole document and promptly cried my eyes out, while Adrian leapt into action suggesting the most logical steps to getting it back.

I searched the recycle bin.. I searched every other facet of my computer that I could think of.. Oh yes, I was mad. And very, very upset. Adrian talked me through searching for temporary files that could have been left behind, and for AutoRecovery files, and for every other trace that it could have left. We searched high and low.

After a long time, Adrian ran back to his host family's house to get some dinner, and while he was gone I had the ingenius idea to search on the internet for a program to recover it. I found one which looked very trustworthy. I downloaded it, and it searched and found several AutoRecovery copies of my file! But then it asked me to register before it would give me access. Registration was $39.95. I paid up. (I also noted their 100% satisfaction guarantee, "or your money back" - so I'm counting on that).

Typically, the licence key that they gave me didn't work. Adrian came back online and I confessed having paid way too much for a program that probably waits 24 hours to approve your registration. We searched, coming closer and closer to the file.. but alas, it was not there.

Applications close in 2 hours time. I could write another one. But after I got over my frenzy of tears and frustration and death threats directed at my computer, I decided that any application I wrote now would be rushed and of poor quality. Each of the criteria should be at least a page, and I had it SO worked out before.. I could never write another one half as good. I will just have a holiday.

So thus endeth the most devastating, traumatic experience (involving a lost file) of my life. Do you feel my pain??? Oh my gosh. Well I'm over it now, and I accept that I wasn't meant to apply for that job. There is a reason for everything, I am told, and I will never know the reason why Word ate my file.

Thanks for listening. I feel a little better now. I know you will sympathise with me, and I hope that you never have to go through such a crisis in your lifetime. I will write a book about it someday.

* A little bit tongue-in-cheek. But only a little.