My Brother, The Magnet, and a Strongly-Worded Letter

If you guys follow me on Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, you may have noticed last week that I had a pretty rough time, technologically speaking.

For the past few months I have dedicated my free time to a project that is very near and dear to my heart. I spent hours shooting video, conducting interviews, gathering images, researching music, and piecing together a 7 minute promotional video for a ministry at our church.

Two weeks ago I made the mistake of sending the “completed” video to my brother who is a professional broadcaster. Basically, I was looking for a virtual pat on the back. His email back to me said, “Have you already submitted this to the church? I have a couple pages of notes if you’re interested in hearing them.”

My response to him was something along the lines of “Haha! Yeah, okay. What are your notes?”

I thought he would pull the whole, “There is something very important you need to change on this video . . . NOTHING AT ALL, SIS!”

And then we would laugh and laugh and laugh . . .

He responded, “Can I call you in 30 minutes?”

And then I got to thinking that maybe he wasn’t kidding about the notes.

Y’all, he wasn’t kidding about the notes.

I sat on the phone with my big brother for an HOUR while he critiqued my pet project. It felt like I was standing in that 360 degree mirror on the show What Not to Wear. You know, that show where the “fashion victim” stands in this mirrored box and explains why he/she chose to put together such a pitiful outfit. Meanwhile, the two professional stylists are outside the box stating the obvious.

“Like, scrunchies are soooooo not okay.”

(Seriously, though, I still wear scrunches. They just don’t always match my appliqué jumpers.)

Though I’m 100% in favor of constructive criticism, it’s never easy. And those who say they are totally comfortable with it probably loooooove colonoscopies as well.

But for the rest of us, feedback hurts.

I tried not to get defensive as I jotted down note after note after note . . .

“Thank you sir, may I have another?”

I managed to cough up a “thank you” before I hung up the phone and slammed my head down on my desk a few dozen times. Here I was 100% done with a project, and my brother just gave me another week’s worth of work to do.

The truth is that his feedback was incredibly beneficial. (But don’t tell him I said that or he’ll want me to pay him or something.)

So, although I thought I was completely done with the project, I put in another week of tweaking, cutting, finding additional footage, and doing all the work that most TV broadcasters can accomplish in a matter of hours.

Side note: I have a degree in broadcast journalism. And in my last semester at the University of Georgia, I realized just what I wanted to do with that degree. ANYTHING BUT BROADCAST JOURNALISM.

And it only cost my parents a small fortune. 

I was a few minor tweaks away from what I believed was a finished video product. And on a whim, I decided to save a full HD (high-definition) version of the video to my computer’s hard drive. This entire project was “parked” on an external hard drive that attaches to my MacBook Air. I don’t keep many files on my computer since it has a very small hard drive. So, for me to save a full HD version to my computer’s hard drive was totally out of the ordinary for me. And I really can’t explain why I did it at that moment with so few changes left to make.

After the version was saved, I continued to make minor changes. As I worked I noticed a large magnet sitting on my desk. It’s one of those desktop toy things that executives have . . . well, executives who don’t know any better.

As I went to move the magnet, it PICKED UP my external hard drive and proceeded to mangle the components inside of it. I knew immediately that something was wrong. It began to make a horrible scratching and churning sound that was similar to the sound that came out of my mouth when I realized what had happened.

Mere moments from completion of this very meaningful project, I completely removed all traces of it.

All except for that glorious, HD copy left on my hard drive.

I was too shocked to cry. I couldn’t believe how careless it was for me to even have that magnet on my desk! Since Brian is our resident Mr. Fix-It, he began to research our options. He made a few phone calls to places around Kansas City until we realized that it was going to cost us $2,000 to retrieve the contents of that hard drive. One computer guy Brian spoke to said something about needing a “clean” room where they could open the hard drive. Apparently it’s expensive to find clean rooms around here.

Don’t I know it!

The great news in all of this is that the ministry leaders are happy with the final product, and I don’t have to write a strongly-worded letter to the executive desk toy manufacturer. Though, I already had a pretty solid rough draft on my company letterhead.

I was going to send it to my brother to get his feedback.

In not-at-all-unrelated news, Brian decided to sign us up with an online backup company called CrashPlan. I’ll let you know how we like it.

Do you have an online backup service you love?