Trust

Save death and taxes, I have come to accept that there are very few things I can count on in this life. Devices will fail at the most inopportune time, cell service will peter out just as I need to hear a specific piece of information, and we will have run out of the exact spice I need when I am in the middle of cooking. (Admittedly that last one is likely because I forgot to add it to the grocery list, so no one to blame there but me.)

To guarantee that things will work when we want them generally requires that we pony up for that peace of mind. Once we do, we expect the entertainment, finance or security service to be there when we need them. We trust that they are engineered to work as described, their downtime will be minimal at worst, and non-existent at best. But for some reason that escapes any kind of logic, the one thing I seem to trust the most is a free service on which I have staked almost my entire life, the Google ecosystem.

There are, of course, other options. But if you are a fellow traveler in G World, it's hard to beat the cost-value equation. For the grand sum of nothing, you get an email account, a place to keep your contacts, a calendar to organize your world and a reasonable amount of online storage to stash your stuff. Like many, I pay a tiny amount to up the size of that electronic closet, but relatively speaking it's still nothing. I do understand there is an implicit cost: they get my eyeballs and online behavior as grist for their data mining mill, and their products lead me to their search service and its ability to generate multiple millions of dollars. But since I am pretty boring and not covertly employed by a Russian spy agency (at least currently) I am willing to make that devil's bargain. 

And so as day turns into night and back again, I have come to rely on it, and expect that no matter what else happens in the world that it will function smoothly. So I was surprised the other day when I went to retrieve a document, a simple music playlist, and it wasn't there. Probably me: I must have mis-remembered the name or put it someplace I didn't intend to. I poked around, checked the trash, ran a search or two, but no dice. Funny and perplexing, but I assumed it must have been something I had done, and it was lost to history. Couldn't possibly have been them. Thankfully not a big deal, just annoying, and I would have to be more careful going forward.

But then it happened again. This time it was an itinerary from a recent trip. Like the playlist, I Iooked for it and it was nowhere to be found. But if one is an accident, two is a trend. Something must be going on at Google HQ and it wasn't good. And if I couldn't trust a humongous faceless tech company that gave me something for free not to lose one of the multi-gazillion pieces of information it has from humans all around the world, whom could I trust? (Hmmmm... when I put it that way...)

After doing a little research I found that there was a final option. Seems that if you reach out, there are ways they can dig a little deeper. I figured the odds of getting a human and having them help in a timely manner were small, but why not give it a go? So I started clicking and pretty quickly got to TJ. He asked a bunch of questions, had me try a few things to no avail, then said he would start the recovery process. He warned it might take 48 hours and there were no guarantees, but keep an eye out.

Within 10 minutes my files were back. Oops. In looking at the delete dates, I recall I was cleaning out a bunch of stuff and must have snagged those two files accidentally. Almost miraculously they righted my wrong. So it turns out that two things are now apparent. You CAN trust a huge faceless corporation. And you CAN'T trust me. You have been warned.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford thought it was a good idea to clean things out, but he was wrong. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.