Everybody says it at one time or another. They grapple with a personal issue, a mechanical problem, an unsolved mystery and then they toss and turn instead of sleep all night long. Well, I said it to a writer friend I called on Tuesday morning.
“I didn’t sleep a wink last night,” I said to Phil Alves.
“What’s the problem?” he asked considerately.
“I’ve lost a big file.”
And he moaned a knowing moan, because he’s done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. But in my case, I’d really done it.
With all this lockdown and pandemic time on my hands at home these past months, I’ve worked pretty steadily at writing a new book. In fact, on Monday night I’d nearly completed the 10th chapter, almost the end of a manuscript of well over 100,000 words. But just before I shut down my laptop for the night, I accidentally deleted most of that Chapter 10 by accident. Well, I searched everywhere on the computer. But I came up empty handed. And all night long it haunted me.
Next morning, I got up, took my frustrations out on a long walk, then I thought of my late, great brother-in-law. Bill Doig used to run an industrial shop with his dad Harold, a WWII navy vet, in downtown Saskatoon. Bill had a universal antidote to a problem, especially one he couldn’t solve himself.
“You’ve just got to know the man,” he’d say.
Bill lived most of his life in that wonderful prairie city. He was one of those people who could meet anybody and befriend them in an instant. But Bill also was a great listener. And those personal traits became the foundation of a flourishing industrial fastener business for him and his dad. During the years I lived and worked around Saskatoon, I often turned to Bill – not just for nuts and bolts, but for advice too. I knew I could get a pretty sound answer from Bill. He became the man I often turned to.
There are plenty of people around like Bill. And in the days before Google when you needed an instant answer, men and women in the know could be pretty reliable and helpful in jam.
I remember an instructor in broadcasting I met at Ryerson in the early 1970s. Andy Kufluk taught us fledgling broadcast journalists all about radio technology. His job wasn’t so much to teach us how to repair a broken microphone. He simply had to help us understand the way it functioned so that we could use it correctly and to its full potential. For most of us, including me, however, he might as well have been instructing in Greek.
“I know none of you has the foggiest notion how a microphone really works,” Kufluk would say. “Well, I’ll explain it once. I’ll explain it slower a second time. I’ll even go over it again one-on-one, if you like. But after that, just chalk it up to magic.”
I came away thinking that most radio technology was just plain magic. But when it came to knowing broadcast technology, for me Andy was the man.
Years later, when I worked on a television show on CBC in Alberta, I worked with a great co-host. Lee Mackenzie had a wild sense of humour. You know that town in Wales with the longest name in the world? It’s got 58 letters and 19 syllables. Well, Lee could rattle that name off in seconds.
“Llanfairpwll-gwyngyllgogerychwyrndrob.”
It was a great party trick. But more important, Lee could see to the heart of the people we met and interviewed on our weekly program better than anybody on the show. When it came to finding and gauging guests for great current affairs TV, Lee had a sixth sense. If I was ever in doubt, I asked her. She was never wrong.
So what’s all this got to do with my deleted chapter? Well, after my sleepless Monday night, I knew I had to find help. As I said, I called Phil Alves a writer/computer wiz friend. And he and I grappled with my lost file for half an hour. After which, we both agreed:
“It’s time to go to the man.”
In this case, it was Rob Hart, a Mac computer specialist at Centennial College. From years of experience, we knew that Rob knew Macintosh systems inside and out. And sure enough, in about 10 minutes Rob had found my deleted file in a “temporary items” folder in the bowels of my computer.
And it was indeed there temporarily. Moments after we recovered my chapter, the temporary file disappeared. I can’t describe the relief or my eternal gratitude to Rob and Phil and Bill and Andy and Lee – all those people quietly in the know.
I can’t pay them enough for their unassuming genius.