Unexpected Things

As I sit here in the airport, I’m thinking about all those times when things don’t go as we expect. For example, I awoke at 3:45 this morning, expecting to leave from the Medford airport at 5:50 and arrive in Denver for the Accessing Higher Ground conference at 2:37 this afternoon. Instead, here I am in Eugene at 2:45, hoping that this flight will go as planned and I will indeed end up in Denver at 9 ish this evening.

When things don’t go as expected, do you have a way to handle it? What about when your technology doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, or if it fails? Do you know what to do if you get a virus? Having a backup plan is always a good idea. Here’s my top 3 recommendations to prepare for those times when things don’t go as expected…

1. Backup, backup, backup! If you are storing all your documents on your network F: drive, then this is happening for you automatically. But what about at home? Do you have old files backed up somewhere? Or are they all just sitting on your hard drive, waiting for a virus? There are a number of good backup programs out there. Get yourself some rewritable CDs and make backup copies of your documents. Assistive technology users should also make backups of their program preferences - face it, do you really want to have to train Dragon again or go through all those settings on JAWS again? Save preference files and keep a copy with your application CDs.
2. Know where you put your application CDs, and keep any licence key numbers with them. Keeping all these things in one spot will make locating them easier should something go wrong and you need to re-install the application. If you downloaded a program from the internet rather than receiving a CD for it, it’s an excellent idea to make a backup copy of the installation software on a CD.
3. Keep technical support contact information somewhere that you can find it. It’s really irritating to know that the support contact info you need is on the internet somewhere, but you can’t get to it because your computer won’t get to the internet.