Print Everything Before Friday

The certainty arrived on a Monday and behaved like a chore I had already agreed to: back everything up. Print the contracts. Print the timesheets. It had that specific texture of an obligation, as if a meeting had happened and I had missed it but the action items still applied to me.

I resented it. Printing things in our office was practically an act of vandalism — we were paperless, proudly, the whole firm's records on the building's own servers, a cloud migration perpetually scheduled for next quarter. But the nag would not lift. Tuesday I backed up my project files to a personal drive, feeling furtive. Wednesday I printed the three live contracts I managed, plus the payment schedules, and hid the folder in my drawer like contraband. Thursday, on the way out, the nag made me go back and print one more thing — the change-order log — and then, finally, it went quiet, the way a filled-in form goes quiet.

Friday at 9:02 an excavator two streets over went through the district's main feeder cable. The surge that preceded the blackout did something expensive and final to our building's UPS room; I do not fully understand the sequence, but the summary the IT contractor delivered, grey-faced, was that the RAID controllers had cooked and the most recent intact tape was five weeks old.

Five weeks of the firm's work, gone — except where it wasn't. My projects were the only ones that proceeded that month without a single dispute, because mine were the only ones where signed current paper existed. One client, mid-crisis, asked how I alone had hard copies. 'Felt like it,' I said, which was the exact and complete truth.

The firm does quarterly off-site backups now, and I keep resenting my premonitions slightly less. They have terrible manners, arriving as chores. But they file accurately.