Tragedy Has Struck . . .

. . . my office computer crashed unexpectedly. Lost were many hundreds of unimportant work documents, forms, and templates I created over the last four years. A few of my own creative endeavors are also trapped on its stagnant hard drive. Even those don’t concern me. What’s kept me up these last few nights is The Movie List. For those of you that don’t know, I’ve kept a detailed list of every movie I’ve ever seen. Updating the list had become as crucial to my morning as my cup of coffee, or my street side craps game. Creating the list was daunting. I spent three weeks scavenging titles from multiple film guides. Photocopying pages from reference section movie encyclopedias. Sitting in silence for hours; thinking of any obscure made-for-HBO flick that followed First & Ten. It was an exhaustive search, and one in which the initial curiosity is gone. So what does one do in this situation?

You contact Tech Support and tell them your PC is shot, and that its contents are of the utmost value to the Department of Revenue. You tell that most likely doughy, manga reading fanboy that if he isn’t able to successfully cull the files from this PC, his job is in as much jeopardy as mine. He had a new hard drive shipped directly to my apartment the following night. For the last two days he’s been in the cube Lizette left vacant. He works through lunch and updates me hourly, saying that the work looks promising.

I glanced over at him as I left the office yesterday. I felt pained to see a professional working so diligently to retrieve what is nothing more than a symbol of my obsession. What does it matter that I have a list of movies I’ve seen. It doesn’t mean I understand any of these movies more than the next person. Hell, some of the movies may have been listed in error. For what reason should that man toil to service my hobby? Then I remember: I think I have nudes of ex-girlfriends on there, too.