I tend to be pretty lucky. Things just naturally work out for the best for me. I’m not saying I’m the Jerry of my office – especially since I don’t have an office right now – but things do seem to even out at the end of the day.

Ok. Maybe I am the Jerry of my office.

So it does surprise me when things go poorly and I end up on the verge of crying where only the warm embrace of a Jimmy’s sangwhuch can hold back my tears.

But that’s the end of the story.

Let’s start at the beginning.

I may have let slip, but I have a new puppy (insert “old puppy” comedy here). And she likes to run around my house indiscriminately. Since she’s never really owned anything except maybe a stick or a torn up sock, she places little value on other’s possessions, especially mine.

Several weeks ago, the new puppy, which will be referred to from here on as Zoë, was running around my coffee table. It is upon this same coffee table that my laptop computer on which I am writing this very missive spends most of its time. Along with my laptop there resides upon the coffee table a 500G external USB hard drive. And along with all these items are the assorted cables that connect everything together– all scattered on the coffee table and , unfortunately the floor.

So in the process of running around the coffee table, Zoë managed to become entangled with the USB cable attached to my hard drive ; knocking it off the table. In so doing, the USB port on the hard drive became detached thus rending everything on that drive unavailable – perhaps lost FOREVER!

While largely used for backups and other non vital data, to free up room on my laptop hard drive, I keep my iTunes music catalog on the external drive. But with all of that music still intact on my iPod, there was no panic. I could take my time to figure out how to get that data back.

This all happened when I still had a job. So as one of my first chores during unemployment, I tasked myself to fix my hard drive. I found two solutions. There was a utility called TuneAid that would suck off (mark) my music from my iPod. Additionally I found a – ok this is going to get technical – a SATA to USB cable apparatus. All I would have to do is remove the actual hard drive from its enclosure and attach it to this cable apparatus.

I started with the apparatus. It appeared to work. I could see all the directories that I knew were there. However whenever I tried copying anything to my main drive, I got a “File Not Found” error.

SHIT!

Time to try TuneAid.

And this is where the story gets truly heartbreaking.

You see, I had connected my iPod to an empty iTunes catalog a few times, and nothing happened.

TuneAid could see all of my music on my iPod – good news! It was all still there. I began the process of transferring music from my iPod to iTunes. But what I didn’t know was that, without warning, it would stop at 25 songs since it was the demo version.

And once it stopped, iTunes realized, “Hey, I’ve got shit to synchronize now”, and began synching with my iPod – erasing everything that was left on my iPod – FOREVER!!

And all my music was gone FOREVER.

Well, to be fair, TuneAid, starting at the bottom of my catalog, did save all my ZZ Top and Zebra. Oh happy day!

It was then I assume Trent felt a great disturbance in The Force and knew that I had a hurt that only Jimmy’s could cure. I recounted my tail of sadness to him before going back home to kick Zoë for making me download 40G of music.

And it was then, while sitting on my couch, contemplating what I’m going to do, that I saw the jumper setting. By default (sorry, more techno jargon), my drive transfers at a rate of 3Gb/s. With the jumper added, it transfers at a slower 1.5Gb/s.

“What the fuck”, I thought.

So I added it.

And everything worked perfectly.

You see, it all does work out perfectly in the end.