Reflections After the Flood
No, I’m not waxing apocalyptic, just thinking about some things after a minor workplace disaster this morning.
I walked in to our work area this morning and found several boxes of my stuff shoved into the middle of the floor and Frank’s desk looking like a tornado zone, with posters and papers stacked haphazardly on the floor, instead of on the desk near the wall where he usually has them.
Apparently an air conditioning unit exploded over the weekend, several floors above us. The water coursed down the inside wall of the building, flooding workspaces on several floors.
This little adventure has caused me to reflect on a couple of things:
- The time for a backup is before you need it. I have not done a systematic backup of my files in too long. Luckily, my laptop was at home with me. But if I had left it at work, it would at least have been splashed and at worst could have been soaked.
- I love my Tufte books; I should be more careful with them. My biggest concern was that the three books I own by Edward Tufte might have been ruined. Luckily, the box they were in appears to have absorbed most of the moisture. I think I’m going to place my most valued and valuable books in a more secure location…
- PDF is waterproof. One damaged item was printout of a downloaded book I purchased a while ago. Gratefully, I still have the pdf I downloaded. I’m glad I didn’t delete it after printing it out.
- The Internet is amazing. I was most concerned about salvaging printed presentation slides from a session the UIE 13 conference last fall. I would have just written Jared Spool and asked for an electronic replacement, but I had taken extensive notes in the margins. The ink had bled a little, but for the most part the pages looked OK—just wet. So I did a quick Internet search on “water damaged books.” The results were amazing.
I discovered that the treatment for fully soaked books was different from wet or partially wet book, which was different than for “damp” books. (My items ranged from “damp” to “partially wet”.) I learned that in the worst cases you can freeze or even freeze dry books until a professional can be brought in to do the job right. (I was fortunately not in such dire straits, but interesting to know!) I learned that time is of the essence, but not to dry books out too quickly under high heat, or else additional damage may occur. I learned that damp bindings can cause mold problems even after the pages seemed fully recovered.
In truth, I found more than I needed to know. All I had to do was interleave a paper towel every 10-20 pages or so, let that sit a while, then stand the book on its edge with the pages fanned out for final drying.
But it was a confirmation of the power of the medium, that within minutes of discovering a relatively obscure and infrequent problem, I had more answers than I could use, right at my fingertips.
That’s all. Nothing too profound, just gratitude that things weren’t as bad as they could have been, appreciation for some people that I never met being generous enough to put their expertise out there for others to benefit from, and some timely reminders that there are things I can do now to prepare for disaster later.