The end is nigh

I have seen the future, and it sucks! The euphoria of Christmas has already passed, and now the reality of life is creeping back. My wife is up from home to visit Toronto and get a look at the housing here. She also had an interview at work. The interview went well. She was offered the job. Starting date is two weeks hence. Three months, six months, that could be do-able - considering that notices would be required; a house would need to be sold, packing and moving would need to be arranged. But two weeks?

Did I mention that "affordable" housing in the Toronto area requires far more than our combined family income? It's all so depressing.

This pessimism might be partly caused by an incident at work. We arrived together, yesterday morning, after a week's holiday. When I got to my desk, and saw that my computer was gone, I realized the place had been burglarized for the second time in a month! The first time, I had been lucky - my computer, and all my hard work, had been spared. I think that the installation of security measures gave all of us - the boss and myself included - a false sense of security. While I had initiated a practice of "centralized" storage for my work, I had only been backing up current work - the "critical" files (after all, unless the process is automated, backing up EVERYTHING on your computer on a daily basis is just too tedious and space consuming).

Long story short... I lost a host of stuff that had taken me weeks to accumulate, but was no longer on my current radar. Since it hadn't been deployed yet, my "local" copy was the only one in existence. And now, all that stuff is gone. Considering I had just finished a very demanding assignment in record time, the sting of losing even a portion of that labour took the joy out of the fact that 95% of my work had been saved.

I felt so sorry for my boss yesterday. When I told him the bad news about my loss, I detected a "I wish you had backed up EVERYTHING" look on his face. He reserved most of his scorn for the poor representative from the security firm - the one that installed all the high-tech security gear after the first break-in.

I think things will change early in the year. We'll probably get steel bars on the windows - or better anchors for the computers. During this break-in, anything that was anchored with high-strength steel chains was left in place. My computer was gone, one of two that had been installed without the chain.

I'll try to put all this out of my mind as my wife and I spend New Year's Eve and following day together. Though it may feel like the end of the world, I guess it's really just the end to a very troubling year. Here's hoping next year will be better.