Imagine heat clawing your face as your custom-made home burns to the ground. You want to close your eyes against the sting of smoke coming from the house-shaped hole, but horror locks them wide.
You’d made that home to be your haven. Your own comfortable space. You’ve spent almost ten years making it that way.
After the smoke clears, your haven is only pungent ash.
This shouldn’t have happened. You had understood what the house meant to you, and had installed every preventative and protection twice over. Alarms, alerts, extinguishers, risk sensors…
This shouldn’t have happened. But it did anyway.
By the time the air cools, you feel nothing. You think that might feel like relief, if you were aware of sensation at all.
You think of what would be required to rebuild your haven as it was. No. That would be simply too much work. You ache from fatigue at even the threat of it.
You’ll need to build something, though. Eventually. Your new house will just have to be different. A new design.
You think fleetingly of the various disorganised piles of miscellany you’d had in your home. Stuff that you’d always meant to get around to clearing, and ordering, but then never did.
The smell of ash reminds you that now you don’t have to. A wry twitch pulls at the edge of your mouth.
You feel tendrils of anticipation as you imagine what your new haven could look like. But you also feel tired. It will take a long time to build a haven from scratch, however it’s to look.
Your eyes close easily, now. Blissful dark. The colour of denial. There are no problems to be seen in the dark, which is just as well, because you don’t have the emotional energy to deal with any.
Then you feel a weight lifted, and your eyes fly open to discover it had been in quite the literal sense. In a brightly lit computer lab, you see a man standing in front of you, holding the headset he has just taken off you.
‘Yes, that happened a week ago,’ you blink, your heart beating fast from re-living the destruction of your carefully curated virtual haven. ‘I’d had two backups plans, but they both failed.’
The man tilts his head with a small smile. You think the response is too mild for the kind of loss you’ve just described. It’s condesending.
‘As it happens, you didn’t have two backup plans,’ he says. ‘You had three.’
What? You can only blink at him.
‘An excessive number of contingencies for the common user, perhaps,’ he concedes, ‘but, fortunate for you. You’d bought a backup subscription with us, also. Some years ago now.’
‘I… forgot about that,’ you whisper.
‘We didn’t.’ The man holds up a card with a small gleaming chip set into it. ‘We have a complete copy of your home and all its contents installed on here, ready to restore to your own equipment.’
The world is spinning, and you remind youself to breathe. ‘…I thought I’d lost everything. You can give it all back? Just like that?’
The man smiles again. It’s the same smile, but it looks less condescending this time.
He puts the chipped card in your hand. ‘Welcome home.’
And that, boys and girls, is the story of my emotional turmoil over the loss and then not-loss of this website. The third backup system that I hadn’t remembered implementing flew in with flowing cape and cinematic soundtrack, and restored everything.
Three backup systems is not too many. The reason you know this is true, is because I’m telling you. In this blog post. On this website.
See?
Paranoia saves lives.
