Ok, so no one in the family has bad health (at least not yet, we’ll see what happens in a few weeks after the stress from the holidays and everything I’m about to unload takes its toll) and for that I am very grateful, but we have been hit by some bad luck in the past few days.
First was worst – my husband’s hard drive went kaput. No warning; he just went to work Monday and found that virtually everything he had worked upon for the past 5 years or so is gone. Software he had written, info for clients that are now going to be extremely unhappy – everything. There are few options; everything he read on the internet about this problem raises little hope. He can send the hard drive away to a company with special equiptment, but it’s doubtful they can fix it, plus the price tag would be $1500-2000. Basically there is no hope for the hard drive, and it’s essentially as if he was laid off from his job less than a month before Christmas.
As if that wasn’t enough, we noticed the other day that we no longer have a metal flap guarding our van’s gas tank. We have no idea what happened to it, but now that it’s missing, we are going through gas about twice as fast as we should be. Of course the car is no longer under warranty, so it will cost who-knows-how-much to fix it. The glove box broke months ago, and the tires are getting pretty bald (all 4 of course). We were going to get everything taken care of at the same time, but with no income now, that won’t be happening.
And for #3 – our mortgage company decided to buy us extra disaster insurance for our house. Except it’s not their treat – we have to pay for it. What happened is that we switched insurance companies about a month ago, trying to save money. Apparently there was some sort of mix-up, and everything was not transferred smoothly, leaving us lacking in the disaster area of the insurance. So the mortgage company got us some of their own choosing, added $300 to our monthly bill, and sent us a letter about it after it was too late to avoid paying this monthly fee. I hate insurance companies!!!
Don’t mean to complain, like I said earlier, at least no one is ill and we do still have our health – that is the most important thing. And if it’s really true that bad things happen in threes, then we should be done with the bad news for at least a little while, right?
You would think so… YIKES!
So sorry to hear about all of that. Metal thing for the gas tank…. Hmmm sounds like some one was siphoning off your gas. Those things tend to break off when you remove siphon hoses. It is probably floating in your tank now. Could it be time for a locking gas cap?
I was thinking of siphoning being a possibility. It could have happened around here, though I tend to want to blame the urban areas we visit like Chicago and Toledo.
Unless you have rust around the gas fill area, the only way those things usually break is by them being forced in some fashion. That usually means someone siphoned some gas or at least tried.
Ouch. C, C- no backup? Yes, it looks like you will have to have the data recovered professionally which is expensive- the more critical something is, the more they gouge you and recovering business data is among the most critical.
Was going through gas twice as fast a one time thing? That would definitely verify the siphoning.
I pray you get all of this worked out soon!
When our computer crashed, the tech we had was able to recover everything and it only cost us about $200. Of course, I am sure you had a lot more on it. I sure hope your luck changes soon.