my worst (work) nightmare

After a nice weekend, I woke up this morning thinking about all I had to do and just knew the week would fly by... man, was I wrong!!!

I got to work 5 minutes early with good hair and a sweet tea (the day was already moving in my favor). A few minutes into being settled and checking emails, I got one of those annoying update pop-ups; the kind that ask to "restart now" or "restart later" every 5 minutes until finally you choose "now". After escaping it twice, I decided I might as well get it over with and reboot. My computer restarted and my previous windows and task started opening up, only now I couldn't interact with them. You know what I'm talking about, when your mouse moves on the screen but your clicking accomplishes absolutely nothing. Well, this wasn't a first for me, so I did the standard ctrl + alt + del to manually close things in my task manager. Long story short, I couldn't navigate this screen either and my computer was officially frozen. I powered down and attempted to reboot. I attempted again. And again. And again (after giving it some time). And yet again... until I got the hint that the black screen with a blinking cursor was the furthest I was going to get.

My next move (still hopeful my computer was just being sensitive) was to have a co-worker submit a help ticket for me and wait. They called me relatively quickly for more details and immediately suggested it could be my hard drive. Still not trying to panic, I brought my laptop down to the IT floor and left it to be worked on. Within 30 minutes, I got a call confirming my worst nightmare- my hard drive had died. There was no way to recover my files or my emails from the PAST THREE YEARS!!! I couldn't believe it. As a matter of fact, I don't know that it has actually sunk in yet. At one point my eyes watered up but I quickly snapped out of it and started planning how I could get any work done in light of my predicament, after all it was only 10am.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that our company's largest event (which I've worked months to plan) starts in just a week's time- but don't worry, they think they will have a computer for me before I head out of town. Sympathy welcome.