Beautiful Oops! is an interactive book for ages 3 and up. So I bought it for myself this week. I love its philosophy–don’t be upset when you make mistakes or things don’t go the way you expect. Instead be creative.
Andy and I have had plenty of practice doing that this year, of course, and I had another chance just yesterday. I was playing around with some new techniques in Photoshop and decided I would try them out on a picture of our shed. I had spent hours and hours organizing the pictures of the land into well-named folders and subfolders and knew exactly where I could find the picture. Oops! All the folders and subfolders were there, but the pictures were gone. What??
Time to trot out the magic words: “What’s the opportunity here? What can I learn from this?” So I went off and did some chores while I pondered the matter. I had checked some of my backups– the files had disappeared weeks ago. It eventually dawned on me I had installed a new photo managing program a few months ago. So I checked the receipt– I had bought it January 9th. Sure enough, the files had disappeared between the backups of January 7th and January 16th. Mystery solved. The program had moved the files to a folder of its own choosing, and since I knew the names of the individual files it was easy enough to track down where that folder was.
For now I’m just going to rebuild my own folder system and put it on an external hard drive so it will be safe. In the future I’ll take the time to understand the new photo management program and see if it’s worth it. Andy loved it when he was using it on the PC and was putting off managing his new pictures until the program was available on the Mac. I bought it for him when the Mac version came out early last year, but he hasn’t gotten back to looking at his pictures yet. At least he’s been warned that his new version doesn’t work exactly the way his old one did. 😉
I wouldn’t exactly call this a beautiful oops!, but it was definitely educational. If nothing else it reinforced the importance of keeping centered and being patient. Any oops! in your life lately?
You say, “What’s the opportunity here? What can I learn from this?”
I hear Tom say “What’s going on here!”
bikehikebabe,
I say, “What’s going on here?” too. That’s when it’s a technical problem that needs to be solved. Not when it appears that hours and hours of work went down the drain a couple of months ago without me even being aware of it. Then I bring out the big guns like, “What’s the opportunity here?” 😀
in that case my reaction would be WHAT the HE double L o!!! #%@$($&!!!
if the same or a similar thing had happened to me, I would have said ‘oops’ or something unprintable and hollered for Ranjan. Nice to have a resident geek!
I should imagine that the sole of my shoe coming off was a oops moment for me!
Rummuser,
It’s also nice being the resident geek. You don’t have to wait for someone else to solve the problem.
Your sole coming off reminded me of when Andy and I were in Australia. We took a water skiing lesson the morning we were scheduled to leave. Unfortunately I managed to leave my shoes behind so we had to stop at a shoe store on the way to the airport. That still tickles me.
when things don’t work or start doing strange things with my computer, i have 2 guys who fix things…the scanner went AWOL again a few weeks ago (I was coping without it) and then for some reason when I wanted to print something desperately for Uni the other day it too stopped working…call in wizard #2 (who instigated those gadgets)…not sure why but the “switching system was the fault of both” – now the printer has a new theme…print out stuff but add a page that just UU in the top left corner…
Tonight my laptop refused to close down – I fiddled, I’m sure I did what wizard #1 suggested, “press down on button for 5 secs” and of course when I did that it worked…
The Net was down as well tonight!!!
University administration side of things…is apparently fixed, but I’m not all that sure because the reasons given seem a little too convenient. Anyway I have another helpmate from the BA days so I might try and see her real soon…
Cathy,
Yes, one thing about working with computers–they give us plenty of practice keeping our cool when things go wrong. Working with them professionally for years also taught me to get things done ahead of the deadline. One never knew when the whole system would crash!
I’m much more simplistically lost. I forgot to turn on the outlet strip for my laptop, after rearranging the furniture in my office. My table pc was working fine; internet connection was great… oops!
dcrelief,
Oh, yes, you are not alone. I do that sort of thing too. 😀