Sometimes, you eat the bear …

I never in a million years would have imagined a day when I had anything in common with Max Verstappen.

Max Verstappen is one of the world’s most accomplished and talented race car drivers, team leader for Red Bull Formula 1. At this writing, he is also points leader for the 2021 World Championship, in the rare position ahead of his main rival, the Mercedes team leader, Lewis Hamilton. Not many drivers can make that claim. For years, Hamilton’s domination seemed unstoppable.

Max is driven. Skilled. Disciplined. And young and good looking and successful and probably ridiculously wealthy. We have almost nothing in common.

But one Sunday told a different story. Our paths converged, emotionally speaking, anyway.

Regular readers know Beth and I recently launched a Youtube channel, dedicated to our travel adventures, exploring microbreweries. Populating a Youtube channel requires video. And making video puts enormous strain on computer equipment.

This is not a surprise, when you think about what video really is. A film or video is nothing more than a slide show. Sleight of hand, made possible by the inefficiency of human eyesight. You need merely to string still photos together and play them in rapid sequence. That tricks the eye into thinking it’s seeing the world in motion.

As bad as they are, our eyes are still pretty good. For the illusion to work, that sequence has to exceed 20 pictures, every second. When Hollywood dominated moviemaking, it was 24. Nowadays, with high-definition video, it can go as high as 30.

Do the math. To make a 10-minute video, you need to stitch together nearly 15,000 photographs. A 90-minute movie? 130,000. To make matters worse, photographs are not little files. They’re whoppers. A single photo created on professional-grade equipment will weigh in at 20 megabytes. This is why even short video files are usually in the gigabytes range. It adds up fast when 20-megabyte photo files are flashing by, 24 times every second.

Video taxes computer gear to its physical limit. It’s the apex predator of the digital environment. Like lions, tigers, hyenas and sharks, it weeds out the old, sick, weak and infirm with laser efficiency.

I’m a writer, so I’ve never needed a new, fast, powerful computer. Files for the printed page take up a fraction of the space needed for photos. Everything I’ve ever written in the last quarter-century occupies just a few gigs of space—the equivalent of one short video. So I have literally never owned a new computer. Never needed one. I could get by with one powered by kerosene, if it would run MS Word.

I knew the day would come when my weak, old and infirm computer would no longer be up to the video task. What I didn’t expect was how catastrophic that failure would be.

We had just finished capturing video at three breweries in Loudon County, Virginia and nephew Andy’s wedding. As I’m pretty OCD about making backups and backing up the backups, that’s what I did. From camera memory to multiple external drives. I don’t remember, exactly. It’s all a blur.

When we got back, I started the process of organizing files pre-edit. That’s when external drive number one failed. Inconvenient, but not the end of the world. And not entirely unexpected, it was an older, spinning type and I knew its day would come.

I used another external drive to backup most of my work from the failed backup. But not all, it wasn’t quite big enough. To get the rest, I had to tap the cloud backup, the backup of the backup of the backup. I ordered a bigger, faster drive that would hold all my stuff. When it arrived, I started the cloud restore.

If you’ve never done a cloud restore, I pray you never have to. Hour after hour after day after day. It’s like climbing a rock wall. You work your tail off for 12 hours and move three inches. Not to mention it doesn’t really work, half the time, so you spend hour after hour on the phone with customer support. Thank goodness for those people. I could not have done it without them.

So after days and weeks, I finally had most of my stuff restored, ready to go on the new hard drive so I could get the hell back to work. I just needed to supplement those files with those from the smaller drive.

Since moving files around is about as exciting as watching paint dry, I had the race on the TV as a distraction. That Sunday morning, Verstappen was defending his position at Baku, Azerbaijan, cruising to what seemed like sure victory. And I was about to button up the new hard drive.

We were both nearly finished, when a ton of bricks landed on our heads.

For a brief moment, maybe five minutes’ time, all my eggs were in one basket, on the new drive. That’s when it failed. I had made the supremely dumb-ass mistake of assuming a new piece of equipment would work. Big, big blunder. As my friend and teacher Bear Sanford used to say: the definition of new is, nobody’s had any trouble with it yet.

Everything, gone. Including everything we’d just shot in Virginia. The whole cloud restore. Plus every video I ever shot, every photograph I ever captured and every document I ever wrote. The output of nearly my entire life and career, wiped out in a blink of an eye.

To say I was upset would be an understatement. I was catatonic. Unable to speak for fear of breaking into sobs. How could two hard drives fail in the same week? It’s almost mathematically impossible.

This, as Max was cruising to the checkered flag. On the last lap, yards to the finish line, his rear right tire blew, knocking him out of the running.

But I wasn’t focused on Max. Rising blood pressure gave me tunnel vision. I retired to the garage to keep from spewing F-bombs in front of my 92-year-old Catholic mother. On a Sunday.

Beth knew I was in trouble. She followed me. I merely muttered, over and over, “I was so close. I was so close … ” as I scanned the garage looking for a sharp object to plunge into my chest.

My spouse, by far the wiser and more grounded of the enterprise, reminded me of the supreme irony of what I had just witnessed on the tube. “So was Max,” she said.

She was so right. We were so close, Max and me. The new hard drive went belly up at the very moment Max was eliminated. As I got out of my seat to find breakable objects to throw, Max, sick with anger, got out of his seat to kick his flat tire.

I was still upset and angry and frustrated, but Beth’s insight talked me off the ledge.

Oh well. We were back to square zero, Max and me.

So I took a deep breath and surveyed my situation. It was worse this time, since much of what I’d lost with this disk failure was not on the cloud, but deleted from that smaller drive. So I had to spend more hours figuring out how to recover them. That software is even slower than the cloud restore. I think it took 48 hours to get most of my files back, but I got them back. Crisis, averted.

Then I started the week-long cloud restore. Again.

I bought another new external drive big enough for everything to fit. You guessed it. It failed. I am not kidding. Three bad drives in the same month? Definitely mathematically impossible. That’s when I threw in the towel and called my IT guy.

“What do you think?” I asked, after repeating the whole sordid tale.

“I think you need a new computer,” came his reply.

I was afraid he’d say that. The drives were not the problem; my weak, old computer was bricking them.

A gazillion hours and many dollars later, I have my new machine and more new drives and safe backups and … knock on wood … lesson learned, back to full capacity.

The Virginia video, nearly lost, is in the can. I finally had a pretty good weekend. My goal was to get the lost video edited and posted Friday. I made it happen early Saturday.

Max keeps getting back in that car. As he and my smart and resourceful wife reminded me; there’s only one way to avoid disaster, by sitting still and doing nothing. (Which is no guarantee—considering the building in which you are doing nothing could collapse on your head at any moment.)

So, you might as well do stuff. That’s what we’re doing. I’ll take my chances.

=S

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