A very dark day

It is almost impossible to believe, but my precariously perched monitor fell this morning (and only one more day before it was put onto a proper desk).  The monitor didn't suffer any damage, but it clipped a portable hard drive, which now seems inoperable.  This had almost all of my recent work files on it, and I don't seem to be able to restore it.  I am just beside myself with anger about the unfairness of it all.  I'll see if I can get the hard drive working at work and perhaps have the IT guy look it over, then take it to one of those data retrieval people who charge an arm and a leg to basically tell you "It's dead, Jim."  This has just ruined my entire weekend and potentially a lot longer than that.  It could be one of those data losses you never recover from.

Update: So the IT guy at work can't help and says I have to contact one of those data recovery places that charges between $500-2000 for this work.  It just seems so incredibly unjust, and that one thing that is close to pushing me over the edge.  The very minor silver lining is that the single most important set of files are the back-up email files, and those are still with my former employer, as are most of the work-related files (from my previous employer).  So I can probably rebuild those.  But probably not all the tifs of things I had scanned over the past year, and some other things that were too recent to be backed up.  I'm really not sure what I am going to do, but there have to be some changes, starting with me ceasing to tape radio off the internet, since I almost never listen to it anyway.  I might as well go cold turkey.  Maybe I'll make some other changes now (even though I suppose anything coming out of such a bad place can't be completely healthy).  I definitely need to cut even further back on visits to Slate.com, and maybe I should go cold turkey there are well.  I'm also cutting back on my visits to this jazz website and discussion board as it is just nowhere near as fun as it used to be.  I'm finding that a lot of on-line stuff is just too much of a headache now, even news sites that I used to visit and now are throwing up pay walls.  I guess the silver lining there is I think I'll start cutting way back on the internet aside from occasional blogging and just try to do more creative writing.  Tending my own garden and all now that I am pretty thoroughly sick of most of what is on-line nowadays.  (Boy, I guess I really am in a tremendous funk...)