I can't recall how many times a day I tell my students to save their work. I almost want to have a push button that belts out the message on a regular basis. On my home computer I have it set up to save automatically but it is not possible on the University computers. Ultimately I get busy and forget to remind them until suddenly a hand goes up and a look of desperation is staring me in the face. Yes, it happens.

This is the frustrating part of working with computers. Thankfully it isn't an everyday occurrence. I recall once working for over a month on an illustration and had indeed saved it. I was putting the last finishing strokes on the image when the little rotating ball started its dance on the screen. No problem, I thought.

I'll simply force quit the programme or reboot the computer and we'll go back and be done. In this situation, it wasn't that easy. The entire computer crashed. When I say crashed, perhaps the word implosion would be more accurate. I couldn't get it to open anything, anywhere or at any time. I should have been paying attention to the signs of slagging times it took to do elementary tasks. However I kept ignoring it until the CRASH. It was trying to tell me that I was pushing too much information on it and not enough memory, but I kept on pushing. Some of my images can become very complex and eat up a lot of memory. This was one of them and it unfortunately tipped it over the scales.

I was doing a commissioned illustration and was nearing the deadline. To save all of the incredibly boring details I had to rebuild the computer, lost all of my work that wasn't saved in another back-up device. Guess what? I had only saved this illustration on my hard drive. It was irretrievable. What had taken me weeks to do, I now had to do it within hours. Lesson Learned.

So now the phrase SAFE OFTEN, probably needs an addendum— SAVE EVERYWHERE!