comedy.

 Above: party, or rehearsal?

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I've been having an unprecedented run of bad luck with regard to computing, probably beginning with tiny_a's cracked screen back in April, then our business hard drive crashing in May, then tiny_b's screen breaking, the printer/scanner dying, tiny_a's webcam going AWOL, etc etc etc etc etc. Not to mention the continuing problems with our building's network, for which I am very informally the administrator.

Etc. So it was with a sort of not-especially-surprised resignation that I logged into Gmail yesterday to find 7 months of email gone, all the way back to January 2011, which for me means thousands of messages are missing. My first thought was that it was some sort of Gmail glitch that would eventually be fixed, but then I saw a new unread email from my dear mother that said "Did you get my email about your Gmail coming to my computer, 6000 of them?"

Ehh. I'm not the pointiest knife in the drawer, but my Correlation Detector was sharp enough to notice that these two events might be related. I called my mother. She was, as usual, doing some serious multi-tasking with the twins when I called, and then her other line rang, but before she switched over to take the call, she said something like "Oh yeah, these duplicate mails...I'm so proud of myself for deleting everything without reading it...what a good mother I'm being. It's taking forever, though, I'm still only at January or something (clicks over to other line)."

Yes. Correlation Detector blinks frantically. So does this mean that my mother has accidentally logged into my Gmail (b/c I guess I logged in on that machine the last time I was there) and is proudly, sweetly, cutely deleting all of my actual mail off the server because she thinks they're duplicates that have been accidentally downloaded to her machine? Yes. And she's deleting everything so that she won't be tempted to read them at some later date...

Sigh. Of course everything turned out OK, the thousands of deleted emails were in my Trash on the server. But for a moment there, I was all "come on now technology karma, nigga please, WTF."

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