Since I Know You Love Reading Complaints About My Personal Life...

There was a time when I dutifully placed photos in photo albums. I even labeled the backs of the pictures with the date and the names of the people involved, sometimes even the location. I don't know what people do now with phone camera images; I do nothing with mine. They just sit there on my phone. It would have to be a knockout photo for me to bother ordering a physical copy.

Then about 20 years ago I stopped buying photo albums and I stopped labeling. My pictures all got dumped in a box, whatever box was available---shoe box, worthless gift box, anything with a cover. This led to boxes of photos situated willy-nilly around the house that I stumble upon sometimes when I manifest the energy to do some cleaning. 

My old HD printer had scanning capabilities, so I temporarily did some photo scanning before I grew too bored to continue. My current printer can scan, too, but I never took advantage of it until I received my memorygram Christmas gift. When writing responses to its various questions, the user can upload a photo or two to include. I love this; it helps bring a story to life. 

So, this time I got serious about scanning my old pictures. I dug out my photo albums and whatever boxes I could locate and scanned like a maniac. I also made sure to title each photo appropriately to make them easier to locate on my PC. 

Then, when I was looking for a specific newspaper article from the 1960's, I grabbed a free 30-day trial of newspapers.com, which led to doing a deep dive into my family history. It was fascinating. I learned things I'd never known and I clipped and downloaded several articles.

Then my PC died.

No problem, right? After all, that's what OneDrive is for! OneDrive saves everything to the cloud, whether you want it to or not. Looking for a document or a music track or a picture on your hard drive? No, silly! That's not where it is! You gotta go to OneDrive! After all, those items don't actually belong to you. They belong to Microsoft.

Oops.

OneDrive apparently decided that I didn't really want my photos, so it didn't knock itself out uploading them. I mean, a half a second? That seems like a lot of work. Oh, sure, it uploaded all the Microsoft-installed symbols like watermelon emojis and the album art that Media Player once downloaded to accompany my music library---you know, stuff I don't care about and have no use for. But personal stuff? Don't be absurd. Why would I want to save that?

Thus, I have no pictures on my PC, nor in the cloud. And all those old newspaper articles? Poof! 

Am I really going to have to start over? Dig out all my photo albums and page through them? Pull out the boxes and rifle through hundreds of photos again? More importantly, is it worth it? I've got maybe six or seven memorygram questions left to answer (that I want to answer; there are plenty more questions), but aside from that, do I really need to have those photos digitally saved? The process isn't exactly 🡳

It took me about a week the first time around, not including the newspaper clippings that are impossible to get back unless I want to pay for a subscription. Even with my free trial, I spent about a week rounding up all the stories. (I was so proud of myself for doing it.)

I'm convinced that within Microsoft there exists a super-secret department that is tasked with psychological warfare. Because it's impossible to mess so many things up by accident. I know that Bill Gates is a weird little nerd, but maybe those are the guys you need to watch out for. They appear so mild mannered, but that's a cover for their sadism. I suppose it's a result of being pantsed one too many times in junior high. 

Regardless of their nefarious intentions, I have a decision to make. Do I:

a) start over scanning photos from scratch?

b) say the hell with pictures and burn them all instead?

c) think it over for a few months and then do nothing?

My usual M.O. is (c). That's always served me well in the past. In the meantime, I'll be cutting out words from magazines to assemble my poison pen letter to Microsoft's corporate office.