The Bloody Doors Off

Lemme tell ya about my new best friend, Phil.

Phil works at Contemporary Computers. And he was on call Saturday when I dialed them up, desperate for help. (Contemporary Computers initially helped me back in December when I needed to swap out my hard drive for an SSD (from a rotational) and add 8 gig of RAM.)

Quick backstory: I’d spent approximately 6-8 hours Friday evening updating my company logo and designing a brand new website. Just after 1am I’d finished, but there was one hiccup. When the page went live, everything was in black and white. And I couldn’t figure out the problem. But that was fine; I’d just get it sorted in the afternoon. I even fired off an email to WordPress Support asking for assistance because I was stumped. (But that’s another story entirely, which I may fill in after I get back on track with why I needed to call for IT help.)

Cut to Saturday afternoon. I was waiting on a response from WordPress, and decided I wanted to add my tagline to the cover image on the site. Not knowing a shit ton of website design (I basically was using a pre-existing template and then removing their shit and adding my own) I thought the best way would be to add it to the jpeg. So I went to Photoshop to load the image.

Which no longer was there.

In fact, the two folders, and ALL the content I’d created the night before, had disappeared.

I checked my recycle bin. Maybe I’d accidentally deleted them.

Nope, not there.

So I ran a search in File Explorer to find out where they’d been moved to. After an excruciating five minutes, it came up with a list of folder and file names. Only they were all listed as Shortcuts, not actual file locations. And if I tried clicking on the shortcut, the computer would inform me the file did not, in fact, exist, and asked if I would like to delete the shortcut.

Eight hours of design work, down the drain. If this had been for a client, I would have to eat the time redesigning from scratch.

After a monumental mental breakdown, in which Marlo patiently listened to me rant and nearly crumble into tears, she suggested in call Contemporary Computers for help.

But they’re not open on weekends. Just an emergency line for ‘managed clients’. Of which, I am not.

I pressed the button anyway, and pleaded with Phil to help. I accepted the hourly quote (which was in triple digits) because I couldn’t afford to wait until Monday to bring in the physical machine, partly because I was starting a new contract on Monday and needed to make sure there was nothing horribly wrong with my year-old desktop.

He remoted into my system, and started poking around. Phil saw the file explorer tab that listed the missing folders and files as shortcuts, but there was no obvious evidence that it had ever actually existed on my desktop. So he loaded some software onto my external drive and instituted a deep scan of my hard drive.

It took 90 minutes and found, you guessed it, absolutely nothing. Well, that’s not true. It did find the Adobe Stock photo I’d purchased last night for the website banner, sitting in my download folder. (Which wasn’t there when I looked earlier.) But it did confirm there was no corruption on my PC, no malware or hacks.

He said, if he hadn’t seen the shortcuts in my file explorer, he’d think they hadn’t been created in the first place. (But I did have an almost working website to also prove I had the original PNGs of the logo.)

I stumped the expert. But Phil offered a parting gift: he only charged me for thirty minutes of his time.

I spent the bulk of my Saturday on the website. WordPress had gotten back to me and said the black and white issue was built into the template I’d chosen; there were two identical templates and I needed to switch the current one out with it’s twin.

Yeah, only when I did that, II LOST everything I’d laid out on the page. Ka-blam. I had to start from scratch. So I spent a couple of hours attempting to rebuild the site. Finally got it done, with an issue with the background this time, there was white around the edges and I wanted a pure black background.

Close enough.

I did a final save and went live.

Only it WASN’T there.

The original template was there in it’s place.

Yet, when I went back to edit mode. Yup, voila, there everything was.

You know what I did wrong? I built it on a Page, but not the Home Page. And even though I could open the List View to see the breakdown, I couldn’t copy it over to the home page.

I had to recreate the website for a THIRD TIME. Only this time I fucking got it RIGHT.

And it only took me half an hour to recreate the logo (once I tracked down the icon I chose), and since I’d already embedded the new logo into my invoices, I was able to retrieve the HEX colours.

It is now Sunday, and I’m happy to report not only is the website live and functional, but the stuff I’d created last night is still on my computer.

And yes, I backed it up to my external hard drive. Just in case.