And Now I’m Frantically Mashing The “Save” Button

Back in the mid-1980s, when computers were just starting to be widespread in business, autosave was a thing of the very near future but not here yet.

I was a secretary at a law firm and got transferred to the newly created IT department. I did training, setups, and troubleshooting, and I reported to a newly hired but experienced IT manager.

One attorney was having a meltdown because her computer froze and she had been working all morning on a contract for a multimillion-dollar project.

Me: “No problem. We can do a reset and restore it from the last time you saved it.”

Attorney: “I haven’t had time to save it!”

She kept screaming at me to get it back. She hadn’t saved it. Not once. A multimillion-dollar deal. Worked on it for hours. Didn’t. Have. Time. To. Save. It.

When I broke the news that there wasn’t a d***ed thing we could do, I thought she was quite literally going to have a stroke. She was screaming so loud that someone called my boss, who listened to her spit-flecked tantrum. When he heard her say that she hadn’t once saved this oh-so-important document, he said:

Boss: “You didn’t save it. It’s gone. What do you want me to do, [Attorney]? Wave my magic wand to get it back? Get it back from where?”

To this day, I’m still astounded that this woman, who had four years of college and another two to three years of law school, didn’t have the common sense to save her work periodically as it progressed, and then screamed at people who were only trying to help her.