My tech expert (Texpert) dropped by to calm me after I lost about 100 pages of the Wrinkly Bits book I’m writing. If it were gone, it would mean hours and hours of profanity, reconstruction, tears, and sore fingers, not to mention the extra gas I would use going to the liquor store.
Texpert was so cheerful, offering assurances (not to worry, Gail, they’re in the cloud). I looked outside, then stepped to the sidewalk, peering upward into one of our glorious blue-sky days. No rain, no wind, and NO CLOUDS. What was he talking about?
Back in the dark ages, my eighth-grade science teacher, Mr. Jasper (the original McDreamy), taught us that there were four kinds of clouds: stratus, cirrus, cumulus, and nimbus. Even today I recall them well because I aced the cloud unit, mostly to impress McDreamy. He didn’t seem to care and changed schools the next year. Today, I didn’t see one cloud in the sky and wailed, “How can they be in the cloud when the sky is cloudless? What does that even mean?!” Did McDreamy fail to teach me the fifth kind of cloud, the invisible cloud, the one that Texpert calls the tech cloud?
I didn’t trust that my hard work would reappear, drifting down like snow from a cloud, which was evidently located somewhere in my ceiling or basement. But I watched Texpert do his thing, poking keys, frowning now and then, while I hovered over him (from six feet, of course). Click, click, click. “Here they are, right where you left them.” Sure enough, they were there, all 100 pages.
No more, no less. (Although a few more would have made my editor happy.)
I have no idea where the cloud is, what exactly it does, or how to access it, but it’s 2020 and lots of strange things are happening everywhere. Even in clouds.
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