Last week I heard a violent clicking noise coming from my laptop. When I rebooted and saw folder with question mark emblazoned on it, I immediately knew my hard drive was screwed. I powered down my MacBook Pro hoping in my heart that the next restart would bring it back to life. My colleagues watch at an increasing distance as I muttered and spat obscenities at my machine. It is not a pleasant site when the IT director’s hardware turns against him.

About 3 hours into this ordeal something miraculous happened. I accepted that the hard drive was toast and moved on. Data had been lost; files, workflows, and applications would need to be replaced, but world was still spinning. I may have set a land speed record for moving through the stages of grief. I backed off and realized that the worst part of the hard drive failure was hoping that there was some way to fix it. Now I know that there were sectors of that disk that had undamaged data. I also know that the files I could have rescued would have been the blurry pictures that should have been deleted from iPhoto and ABBA’s Greatest Hits. The time, energy, and emotion spent trying to rescue a gigabyte or two wouldn’t have been worth it.

My big takeaway from the big crash of ‘08 is that disasters strike everyone. Wishing a disaster didn’t happen often prolongs misery and delays resolution. Wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth rarely results in a constructive recovery. When a disaster strikes, calm and perspective are the two qualities most needed and the most difficult to achieve.

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