You know what sucks? Losing something you spent a lot of time working on. For example, a nearly-ready-to-publish draft of a short story.

I take autosave for granted. In fact, I’m taking it for granted right now with WordPress, which, if I might say so, is precisely what it’s designed for. Anyone disagree? Not that I care. My blog. My rhetoric. Anyways. The funny thing is, not everything in life has autosave features (believe it or not), even if it seems like certain bits should. For example, Wattpad doesn’t have a native autosave feature.

So.

When one is working on a typed something something, doesn’t matter what it is, if one happens to be doing this using Wattpad, one would be wise to consider manually clicking the save button every so often. Another way of thinking of it is to compare this recommended strategy with one that this author highly discourages: The one who is perhaps not so wise might draft up a lengthy typed document of whatever sort, and even if it falls short of being a masterwork the likes the world has never before seen, it still requires due diligence to proofread and edit the whole thing. After a long day and a late night of typing, such a task might best be served with a fresh set of eyes, as would be the case after getting a good night’s sleep. Wouldn’t want to be hasty, skimping out on a quality clean up prior to publishing, now would we?

However, one might happen to notice an icon in the system trey awaiting their attention in the morning. An icon, as it so happens, indicating that updates are ready for one’s computer. Perhaps, never having any prior issues with installing updates before, one might be tempted to rubber stamp all updates as soon as they are made available. A sensible notion, keeping up with security fixes and what have you. And certainly, just because the updates in question happen to be specific for the browser one evidently happens to be using to type the soon-to-be-published literature, there is no mention that following through on said updating process might cause the sturdy, never-failing interweb-bearing application to suffer, how shall we say? A ‘minor’ hiccup.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ah yes! After a good night’s rest, a fresh batch of updates successfully installed, it is now time to — oh whatever. You already know how this story ends. I didn’t think to save my shit. Not even once. I leave all the data in the text field, let it sit over night, install an update for my browser, everything freezes, aaaaaand…

Gone. All gone.

🙂