Found

I mentioned yesterday that my primary USB that I use for all of my school stuff bit the dust over the weekend.

Wah wah wah.

So, since he wasn't on shift today, I asked Dan to call around to the techie places and see (1) if it was possible to pull the files off of the device and (2) how much it would cost. And in between classes, I got this:

I figured it was going to cost us to get that stuff off of the pen drive, but I never fathomed it'd cost that much!

At that point I pretty much resolved myself to the fact that all of the information that I had accumulated over the past 3 years was gone. I had made peace with it.

Then, I get the next text from Dan telling me to call him after the next class was over. When I was able to call, he told me that I would owe him big time....

He had figured out Sunday night that a small metal piece was broken/loose on the chip inside the device. I had asked him not to fiddle with it for fear of him making it worse. Well, since he assumed we weren't going to be paying Geek Squad to fix it and they were our last resort, that fiddling wouldn't hurt it. He got out his soldering gun and tinkered away.

And he got it to work!

Well, he got it to work long enough to get the information off of it. Which honestly was all I cared about. I can get another USB drive. But the information was what I was most excited about. No longer was everything lost. I breathed the biggest sigh of relief.

Lesson learned. Never, ever, EVER go too long without backing up the information on a USB or even on your computer. I hope I never put myself into this situation again!