Last Friday I spent a couple hours writing an essay for the Huntsman scholarship application. Like the fool that I sometimes am, I didn't save my work at all. I had some minor editing still to do on it, and I had a few parts that I needed to add. I was planning on finishing it up that day, but never got back to it. It was left open in an unsaved state when I woke up Saturday morning.
I was working on another assignment in Word Saturday morning when I had major problems with the program. It suddenly crashed, and my page and a half essay and all the work I had put into my assignment were closed without being saved. The nice thing about Microsoft Office 2007 is that it will automatically retrieve automatically saved copies of documents in case crashes happen. Because of this I wasn't too concerned. I re-opened Word and told it to restore the shadow copy of my essay--I hadn't even been working on my other assignment long enough to have it automatically save, so I wasn't too worried about that document. In its attempt to open my essay, Word crashed again. This is where Word fails because the program viewed this as me closing Word without saving the restored copy, even though it was not my intent to have it close, and the shadow copy was deleted forever, never to be seen by myself again. Needless to say, I was somewhat mad at Word. I tried everything I could to find where the file may have been sent in hopes of saving my work, but this was one of the few times that a Google file search failed me.
I finally resigned myself to the fact that I would never see this file again, and went to continue work on my assignment. I got two to three questions in when Word crashed again. Suddenly Word wouldn't even open without crashing. I was getting just a bit frustrated at this point. I was beginning to get annoyed at having to do the first two questions from my assignment over and over again. Eventually Office tells me that Word may have a problem, ya think??!? Word ran some diagnostic and fixed Word so it was working again.
Fast forward to yesterday. Yesterday was the deadline for the scholarship application, so after classes I sat down to re-write my essay. Remembering my experience last week, I made it a point to save my document after writing a paragraph. I then just took off and wrote about a page, taking no thought of saving my work. I was getting near the end, and I was taking a moment to decide where to go next in my paper when suddenly the thought appeared in my head to save. I immediately hit CTRL+S and saved my work. Less than ten seconds later Word crashed, and we went through the same rounds as last week. Word would not open any documents without crashing. Had I not saved when I did, I would have lost an hour plus of work, again. I am pretty sure that had I relied on shadow copies, I would have had the same issue as last week. I even tried recovering data from the document, but what I got was a bunch of characters, and I didn't have my Urim and Thummim with me. After giving up I was able to upload and finish my essay in Google Docs, Google wins again.
Although what happened was a relatively small thing, and some may say that it was merely a coincidence; I believe that someone was trying to save me a lot more work by not having to write that stupid essay for a third time. Had this happened, I may have been forced to kill Microsoft Word.
I suppose that there are two morals to this story. First, if you use Microsoft Office, make sure you save often because you never know when the program will decide to go paper shredding on your documents, Google Docs automatically saves your documents whenever you make changes so you don't have to worry about it. Second, always be listening because you never know when the spirit may tell you to do something that could save something or someone.
When I was thinking about this, I was thinking about my Mom's blog. Every once in a while she will post about certain miracles in her life and shares them with others. She has encouraged anyone and everyone to post their own miracles, so everyone feel free to post and share any miracles in your own lives!
http://burley-itsagreatday.blogspot.com/
