Gaylord Brothers does not sell double bottoms to their metal shelving separately. That particular fact becomes important later.

For the present, suffice it to say I had an interesting summer. For the first five weeks of the break, I fulfilled the “in sickness” portion of my marriage vows tending the needs of my beloved wife who had Achilles tendon reconstruction the day after school let out for summer. I cleaned house, cooked, grocery shopped, and did anything else she pointed to from her invalid’s bed in the recliner.

After seeing Budge safely down recovery road, I journeyed down to my school to check out the damage. Our district closed our sixth grade center at the end of last school year. The stated cause was insurmountable maintenance issues but in actuality, such things are not discussed with those of my pay grade. All I needed to know in the matter was I would have nine more teachers to love and spoil as well as over a hundred more students.

I was so naive.

My trusted assistant and general right hand Chris had already been by the school. He knew I had written grant on top of grant to update the collection and, if I must say, three years of hard work and weeding had paid off in a tight, up to date (2003 on Follett’s Titlewave) and mighty goodlooking collection. He told me to double my “happy pill” dosage for a few days before coming down . . . just to be safe. I was filled with trepidation as I entered the library, and I was not disappointed.

In the center of the library floor, from wall to wall to wall to wall, was a solid cube of cardboard Walmart layaway boxes in various states of disrepair stacked three high. Some had labels like “Fiction A-Be.” Some didn’t. I looked the situation over, assessed it carefully, then sat down in the floor and wept like a baby.

After voicing my misery, I asked Chris to meet me the next morning and at eight o’clock A.M., fortified with Diet Pepsi and sausage biscuits, he and I set to the task of pouring the proverbial ten gallons of liquid into the proverbial five gallon bucket.

It’s germane to note our library was originally an auditorium with floor to ceiling southward facing windows. To save money, our district administration had decreed in May no air conditioning would be turned on during the summer  . . . 120 degrees and 90+% relative humidity. Dante’s Sixth Circle of Hell.

We finished half the first stack and realized that, as much as we loved the airy feeling of using just the middle three shelves, we weren’t going to have enough room. So we stripped the shelves and started over using four shelves. We finished the entire first stack and realized we still wouldn’t room. So we stripped the shelves again and began using all five shelves and turning our light airy stacks into ponderous enclosing walls.

We put the hardcovers on the shelves we had started with, but the paperbacks, picture books, and Spanish language sections remained. Journeying to the former sixth grade center, we found an older set of wooden shelves to house our Spanish books and picture books. We’ll eventually paint the shelves to match the half-wall they abut so they will look more like a natural outgrowth of the wall — a tumor-like, bulbous growth — but an outgrowth nonetheless.

All that remained was the paperbacks. That’s when I had an epiphany. We had two empty single shelves in the back room. They were meant to be wall-mounted, but, I thought, could easily be converted to double-sided freestanding stacks. They were essentially the same design, we just needed a double bottom in place of the supplied single bottom so we could put shelves on both sides. Problem solved. Full of renewed confidence, I called Gaylord Brothers only to be told that they did not sell double bottoms separately from the shelving units. Our simple, elegant solution was shot full of more holes than the Bonnie and Clyde death car.

Now I was no longer sad. I was no longer aggravated. I was hot and miserable, with rivulets of sweat pouring out of every pore to trickle down and pool in unmentionable places. I would have my double bottom come Hell or high water.

I had opposable thumbs and power tools.

I ripped the two bottoms from the single units, grabbed the five pound engineers’ hammer we keep in the library, and began bending metal with a cacophonic combination of blows and curses. Then, I got my drill and found a pack of self-tapping sheet metal screws.

I LOVE self-tapping sheet metal screws.

An hour, one bruised thumb, and lots of loud noises later, I had the double bottom Gaylord Brothers won’t sell. Our paperback section is handsomely displayed on our new, if somewhat Frankensteinian, shelves and the tic I developed on first seeing the mountain o’ books has all but subsided, proving once again very few problems cannot be solved in some way by the judicious application of a big enough hammer and self tapping sheet metal screws.

I have this great Excel spreadsheet on my computer at work. It has all the equipment numbers and IP addresses of every piece of equipment in the school along with the teacher(s) assigned to the stuff, room numbers, copier codes, phone extensions. You know the file. It’s my one-stop lifeline for tech support and troubleshooting. It’s also taken me three years to build and modify. This thing is pretty big and it’s really my baby.

I deleted it today by accident.

Yep. I was cleaning off my Desktop and I just threw the deleting lasso around a bevy of spreadsheets I’d been using to make barcodes for different classes during orientation and dumped them into the Recycle Bin. Then, like the good anal retentive freak of nature that I am, I emptied the Bin. It was only then that I realized that “Staff Database v08-09” had been in the middle of that group of files now smoldering on the cyber-incinerator. Gone. Like a freight train. Gone. Like a ’59 Cadillac.

I panicked.

I swung into action and popped open the two undelete and file recovery programs I keep on a thumb drive for just such an occasion. Both files turned up the same result — they brought the file back, but as a text.tmp file that would not respond to any tool I tried to use on it. Excel would open it into an unreadable jumble of Cyrillic letters and alien characters. Wordpad just produced a bunch of boxes. I Googled and looked for fixes and tried everything I found suggested. I even tried a System Restore. All of my efforts proved to be as futile as an egg-pan under a rooster.

I became physically ill.

As bile rose in my throat and threatened to spew all over my nice LCD monitor, I felt hot tears pooling up behind my eyes. I didn’t know if I should cry or cuss; in the end, I couldn’t decide so I did both.

Now I know everyone is thinking, “What’s the big deal? Just go from your backup. You DO have a backup, don’t you?” Well . . . funny how that goes. I cannot count the times since becoming a librarian and IT support person that I’ve held the hand of a student or felt the tears soaking into my shoulder from a colleague who had just lost HOURS of work to a power surge or corrupted floppy disc. I can even recall from a warm and sunny spring morning during my college days the sight of a beautiful Tri-Delta coed literally picking one of the old style “all in one” Macs up and hurling it out the window of the computer lab . . . the third story computer lab . . . as the lab monitor looked on in abject horror. Seems the machine had eaten all the editing and additions to the term paper she’d worked on for three hours the night before, but that wasn’t what had made her go Office Space on the computer. No, apparently, she’d sat down and started back to work rebuilding the paper when some sort of error message popped up after she did spell-check and when she cleared the message, her paper, five weeks of work, and half her grade in that particular class were gone-gone bye-bye. She left her dorm room address and number with the lab monitor and told him to put it on her next tuition bill. The last I saw of her, she was walking unsteadily across the green commons field towards the beckoning bars of downtown.

But I digress.

Actually, in point of fact, I did not have a backup. I don’t know why. I’m the one who tells everyone else to back up his or her work. I’m the one who backs up all the computers in the school . . . except mine. It’s the IT world equivalent of a plumber who has a runny toilet and leaking pipes. No backup. File is now gone.

I cried some more.

Then, I remembered throw my haze of tears that I’d accidentally sent that entire file out to the faculty last week when I’d only meant to send part of it. I went to our secretary’s computer and asked if she had that email. I knew that even though I’d retracted and deleted the email almost immediately, she had her email client set to automatically open anything from me, thus saving the attachment.

The file was still on her computer!

I sent it back to myself.

I made sixteen copies including two on the server, one on CD, one on every network drive in the school, and one on both of my thumb drives.

I’m so happy now.

Please backup your files.

Many times I think educators in general and librarians in particular get so consumed in minutiae that we don’t realize the really BIG picture. We get caught up in book orders and classes coming in and out and trying to keep up with the latest Web 2.0 tools that we often don’t pick our heads up long enough to take a look at who and what’s around us. We aren’t just working with colleagues, some of whom we love dearly and some of whom were put on this earth to be the bane of our existence. We aren’t just teaching and waiting on students, some of whom we dearly love and some of whom were put on this earth to be the bane of our existence. We are interacting with people who have issues and hopes and dreams and lots of times our library and our schools are not an ingrained part of that dream. The bright new teacher who comes in the library workroom to get coffee may be dreaming of writing a novel or moving to a tropical island. I say all this to say this: we need to dream and we need to hope and we need to laugh and love because as much as we may or may not care about our jobs or careers, one thing is certain . . . they buildings will outlast us, but the people may not. Pick your head up tomorrow and look around. Everyone you see could be gone in an instant and what was the last thing you said to them? You may be gone in an instant and what is the last thing people will remember about you?

I know this may seem morbid, but I’m melancholy and slightly morbid by nature. That has nothing to do with this post. This frailty and mercurial quality of life was just brought home to me in a brutal and shockingly upclose and personal way on my ride home this afternoon.

I saw the black pickup crest the hill and I saw the teal sedan pull out of my subdivision to turn left and I knew that the laws of physics were about to be put to the test once again. The crash was absolutely horrific. The pickup struck the sedan full force in the driver’s side door. The driver had no time to brake after topping the hill. The sedan careened across the road in a crazy spiral and came to rest in the ditch on the far side. I pulled around the carnage and up into a driveway of the subdivision. I already had my phone in my hand dialing *47 for the highway patrol. The dispatcher asked me a series of questions that I barely remember, but judging by soon to come events I must have answered them well. All I clearly remember until reaching the girl was saying to the dispatcher, “You need to get an ambulance rolling RIGHT NOW because this does NOT look good at all.”

Two well-meaning passersby had stopped and for reasons known only to God and their animal instincts to avoid car explosions, pulled the young woman from the wrecked sedan. I was livid, but said nothing since their act was not one of malice but of misunderstanding. Kneeling by the young girl’s side, I took her hand as she slowly regained conciousness. Her face was a jigsaw puzzle of glass cuts and she had a LUMP coming up on the left side of her head that promised greatness. Her left leg was gashed a full six inches long down her calf. She was covered in blood. She was wearing one of the tube/halter-tops that are popular now and a pair of short shorts. She had blonde hair rapidly turning crimson. As she came around, she immediately wanted to sit up. I and one of the other ladies gently pushed her back to the ground. She was bleeding out of her mouth but she started talking and begging us to let her up so she could leave. When I bent closer, I knew why.

She reeked of alcohol. This was bad. She was going to jail if she lived for DUI with injury. Plus, the alcohol was making her blood thinner. I got her talking and asked her for her name, which was Beth. She wasn’t really clear on the year, her age, or where she lived, but judging from the car and the sister-in-law I spoke to later, this latter may not have been solely the result of the concussion. I asked her about her plentiful tatoos including one beautiful star on her neck. She kept wanting to touch her face and she kept asking me what was wrong with her face and where all this blood was coming from. How do you tell an obviously very fetching young woman that the next time she can look in a mirror, assuming she ever can, the face she sees will be very different than the one she left the house with that morning? One thing that struck me as incongruous was the way she kept pulling at her top in a universally feminine gesture with bloodstained hands to keep it from slipping down to expose her strapless bra. Drunk and gravely injured, modesty must be preserved.

After what seemed hours but in reality proved only ten minutes, the paramedics and rescue squad arrived. The professionals took over but I must have appeared to know what I was doing because they didn’t order me out of the way. I asked her who needed to be called to meet her at the hospital. She at first said, “no one”, but finally relented and gave me a relative’s number, which seemed a good sign. I called the relative who proved to be a sister-in-law and told her the story. She screamed and cried and then pulled herself together to start calling family and friends.

Then Beth was in the ambulance and on her way to hospital. It was over and I drove the two hundred yards home. It was only when I walked in the house and got to the mirror in the bathroom that the full extent of what had just happened hit me. I had bloody hands and blood streaks on my face from wiping my eyes. I had blood on my clothes and shoes. I wondered if I needed to go to the hospital myself since I’d deliberately disobeyed every rule laid out to us in the annual blood-borne pathogens video. I decided against it and took a shower with antibacterial soap, shaking like a leaf all the while.

So there you have it. Yes, Beth was stupid and irresponsible for drinking and then driving. She may yet pay for that stupidity with her life. Her father called, a prince of a man I am certain, and, after asking if I’d taken anything from her car, proceeded to tell me that Beth was still in the trauma ward with swelling on the brain. This was five hours later. Five minutes to five and Beth had been sitting around a table filled with beer bottles talking with similarly inebriated friends. By five fifteen, instead of being at the gas station like she’d planned, she was lying in a ditch with a face full of glass and a complete stranger holding her hand and asking about her tattoos.

Look around folks. Look around. It really can all be gone in an instant. Don’t believe it, just ask Beth.

Labor Day is a most excellent holiday for teachers and others who work in the school system. It comes at just the right time . . . usually after the second full week of school . . . to give us a much needed rest. After all, it’s a gear-stripping, heart stopping jolt to go from the “lazy, hazy” days of summer to full throttle with a room or library full of students and a brand new year of expectations and goals — some reasonable, some, as Bogie said in The Maltese Falcon, “The stuff that dreams are made of.”

So, however you chose to spend today, I hope you got some rest in. We did here around the old haceinda. No picnics or partys, beach trips or barbecues, just sleeping late, catching up on reading and family and generally being good for nothing layabouts. Perfect day all ’round.

Tomorrow, though, it’s once more into the breach dear friends. I have a computer that is waiting on me and it will behoove itself to start acting appropriately lest I be forced to go completely Office Space on it.

Take care all. More to come later.