My mind is going. I can feel it.

In fact, it's already gone.

Being a typical (former) tech company employee, I dump everything in my brain onto my laptop: appointments, project notes, random thoughts, drafts, documents, image scans, baby pictures, financial data, CDs to buy. It's highly efficient to have everything in one place, just a click and a scroll away. It's also foolish.

Last week my 15" Powerbook’s hard drive came crashing to a halt with a very unpleasing wheezing and sneezing, depriving me of all the usual bookmarks of my life. I didn’t realize how reliant I was on my external memory unit until it refused to communicate with me. All my piles of essential data, useful websites and useless trivia melded into a single unresponsive slag heap of lifeless bits.

After only an hour at the Apple Genius bar (55 minute wait from the time of my appointment, 5 minute diagnosis), I learned that my case was pretty much hopeless and that I needed a new hard drive. The drive was covered under my AppleCare plan, but not my data. For $150 they'd try to recover my files, but the Genius du jour confidently assured me it was extremely unlikely they would succeed. Of course, for $1,500, they'd send my drive out to another company that would try a little harder.

Which, in an unfortunate echo of Ron's well-timed post, explains why AdWords ads for "Data Recovery" also cost a lot. If you've lost three months worth of work, you're likely desperate enough to pay any amount to get it back. I know I am.

That's also the explanation for the paucity of my posts lately. It's a bit disheartening to have to go back and recreate the threads I had begun, but it's not impossible. I'll put the pieces of my e-life back together as quickly as I can and should be back with a Google-related tale in a few days.

As a quick aside, it does remind me of how wonderful tech support in the Googleplex was by the time I left. Every building had at least one Tech Stop, a full-service repair facility and equipment provider staffed during extended working hours. You could walk in, tell them you were going on a business trip, and walk out fully loaded with a privacy screen, an airplane power adaptor, a laptop case and whatever other cool stuff you saw hanging on the wall that you thought would increase your productivity. If you had a problem, they would fix it, often while you sat there thumbing through the latest edition of Dr. Dobbs Journal.

If you had a problem while VPNing from home, there was someone available by phone 24/7. And they knew what they were talking about. I had an IBM PC laptop on a home Apple Airport network with all kinds of encryption issues that kept me from logging in. They sorted it out and soon had me plugging away happily an extra four or more hours a night from the pajama-clad comfort of my kitchen table.

It wasn’t always that way. When I joined, tech support equaled Zain. Without installing a flux capacitor, one guy couldn’t possibly support the entire infrastructure for a growing company and handhold non-tech staffers when they wanted help changing fonts in a Powerpoint slide. Zain did far better than anyone could have expected, but his focus was rightly on keeping the network up and running. For little stuff, we were mostly on our own.

I figured that with all the engineers in residence, I’d have no problem finding expert help, but surprisingly (to me anyway), they didn’t do Windows. The common response to pleas for help with corrupted .dll files was, “Why aren’t you running Linux?” I got the feeling it was my own fault for being too lazy to learn a real operating system. I’m not soft on the Redmondopoly, but it struck me as a bit out of whack to refuse to engage the platform embraced by the vast majority of our users. Google’s philosophy on that changed over time.

With the addition of Tim, things got much better, but despite his seeming ability to be everywhere, all the time, delivering exactly the right combination of T-1 and sympathy, support capacity lagged problem generation for many years. Eventually contractors were brought in to flesh out the staff and things began to even up.

Google hires a lot of contractors, as do many large tech companies. I’m sure others could go into detail about the advantages and disadvantages of such a dual-status system, but I’ll simply state that I appreciated all the support I got from the Tech Stop staff, without regard to the color of their badges. My support neediness exceeded any reasonable standard, but the service I received was always top-notch and professional.

At times like this, I really miss it.