The Mystery of the Memory Card

So, we’ve had a somewhat rocky re-entry to normal life, following our return from Tenerife last week.

Most of the reasons for that are of the “can’t/don’t want to talk about it on the internet” variety – I kinda hate myself for saying that yet again, but we came home to find some close family members dealing with some really awful stuff, and those are not my stories to tell, so suffice it to say that the week got off to a pretty bleak start, which was only compounded by the awful events in Brussels on Tuesday. At times like this, when everything feels a bit meaningless and surreal, it seems so stupid to be writing about things that don’t really matter, but sometimes the things that don’t really matter are the only things that take your mind off all the rest, so here’s the story of something that REALLY doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things, but which kind of DOES matter to me, even although it shouldn’t.

We lost the memory card for my Go-Pro.

Complete with hours worth of totally irreplaceable footage, which I’d spent ages planning and filming, and which I was really looking forward to watching, and sharing with you guys.

As I said, not a big deal in the great scheme of things, but it somehow felt to me like the final straw, and no matter how many times I tell myself that it’s not important – especially not compared with the Other Stuff that’s happened this week – I just can’t seem to make myself be OK with it.

The memory card was one of two I’d taken on holiday with me. One was filled mostly with my early experiments in using the Go-Pro – so, quite a few clips that I filmed with the lens cap on, or which I don’t know why I even bothered filming AT ALL, really. The other one, however, had some pretty good stuff, including all of the footage of our day at Siam Park, which I was really looking forward to seeing again, all of the footage from our trip up Teide, and… just a bunch of other stuff that I can’t even let myself think about now. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you which of the two memory cards got lost, huh?

GAH.

We’d gotten back in the early hours of Sunday morning, and after a few hours sleep, we headed to my parents’ place to collect Rubin, who’d been enjoying a cheeky little all-inclusive holiday of his own for the past two weeks. While we were there, we figured we may as well repay my parents for their dog-sitting duties by boring them rigid with our holiday videos, so we’d taken both of our Go-Pros (Because yes, we are a Two-Pro family…), which Terry hooked up to my parents’ TV, to show them some of the clips. It was while he was doing this, and switching between memory cards (two of mine and one of his) that he realised one of the cards was missing.

The good one, naturally.

(And, now I come to think of it, seeing as no one’s ever going to see that footage now, I have complete licence to totally exaggerate just HOW good it was. Guys, it was AWESOME. Like, I’d probably have won some kind of award for it, or something. Maybe even Best Documentary at the Oscars, seriously…)

(Ahem.)

It took a while for me to start worrying about this. We’d JUST been watching the footage from the card, after all, and Terry hadn’t moved from his seat on the couch while he’d been showing it, so it HAD to be somewhere close by, didn’t it? None of the rest of us had moved either, and Rubin had been sound asleep at the other end of the room the whole time (He was still sleeping when we realised the cardwas missing: we did check his fur and bed, just in case, but there was really no way he could have come over and made off with the memory card without us noticing, and it’s been a very long time since Rubin tried to swallow anything that wasn’t food, so we’re as sure as we can be that he’s innocent of all charges…), so we concentrated the search on the area around the couch, the couch itself, and Terry’s clothing – which, when we still hadn’t found the card after a good 20 minutes or so of searching, I made him go and remove, so he could shake everything out and be TOTALLY sure the memory card wasn’t stuck to something.

It wasn’t.

Another hour or more of searching commenced, during which we basically turned the place upside down – and I mean that literally:

That’s the couch Terry was sitting on when the card went missing. Once we’d exhausted all other options, we figured the only explanation left was that it had slipped down the side of the couch (All four of us had taken turns to put our hands down the sides and between the cushions, with no luck…) and had somehow worked its way inside it – so the couch got flipped over, the fabric at the base got removed, and Terry and my dad spent what felt like FOREVER, basically, scrabbling around inside it… and finding absolutely nothing.

By this point, not only was I pretty upset to have lost all of my footage, my parents and Terry were completely puzzled as to how the card could have managed to vanish into thin air: we were determined not to give up, so we started the search again, working with the precision of some kind of crack forensics team from a TV crime drama. All of the furniture was pulled out and inspected. The couch was once more subjected to some pretty invasive examination. All four of us conducted a finger-tip search of the living room rug (for about the 12th time that day), after which the rug was shaken, beaten, and rolled in every direction, in a bid to dislodge anything inside. But there was NOTHING inside: and we know that because, having tried everything else, my mum got out the Dyson, vacuumed the rug, vacummed it again, vacummed it for a third time, then emptied the dust container thingy and went through it like someone searching for priceless artefacts on an archaeological dig.

While this was going on, my dad searched every square inch of house that Terry had been on or near, while I patted Terry down like a prison warden searching for contraband.

We never found it: and we searched for hours, so whichever place you’re about to suggest, YES, we tried there. We really did. It had just completely vanished.

Just to try to minimise the amount of scolding I know I’m going to get here: no, I don’t have a backup, and yes, I know how stupid that is. In my defence, I’m normally careful to the point of paranoia about backing everything up, but as I’ve mentioned, the laptop died early in the holiday (right in the middle of me backing up the first memory card to it, actually…), so we couldn’t back the cards up while we were away, and when we got home we were so tired from the travelling, not to mention strung out by the news we’d just come home to, that it just wasn’t at the top of my mind. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

(We had to get special permission to film inside Siam Park. Then we went and lost all the damn footage – lol!)

Like I said, it really doesn’t matter: not in the great scheme of things, and definitely not compared to all of the other things that have gone on in the world this week. In the SMALL scheme of things, though, it kind of DOES matter, because those were my memories, you know? Precious. Irreplaceable. All week I’ve been telling myself it’s OK, because I still have the ACTUAL memories, the ones inside my head, and those I can’t lose. (Well, I mean, I HOPE not, anyway…) I will, however, lose all the little things I’d recorded on those cards: the random details that fade from memory, and which I’d wanted to preserve, but which I’m now unlikely to ever see again. I have to admit, that stings a little, as does the sheer mystery of the thing: if you’ve been reading this blog for a long time, you’ll know that I lose things a LOT, and also that I tend to take it pretty hard when I do. I just can’t STAND not knowing what happened to something: there’s almost nothing I hate more than losing some precious possession, and of all the things I’ve lost, I think this has to be the worst – or the most personal, anyway.

It could still turn up, obviously. I mean, I seriously doubt that it will now, because we left no couch unturned in our search, and I suspect that if we didn’t find it in the first 3 hours of searching, we’re probably not going to find it three days, weeks, or even months later, are we? Our best guess is that it’s inside the couch somewhere, in some hard-to-reach place that would only now be accessible if we were to take the thing apart – which we’re obviously not going to do, because it’s JUST A THING, AMBER. Why do I always have to care so much about stupid stuff that can’t be helped?

So we’ll wait and see if it ever re-appears. In the meantime, well, I guess I just keep on reminding myself that it REALLY doesn’t matter, and that I’m dwelling on thing like this, purely because it’s easier than thinking about the things that DO matter: the big things, the important things, the things that are truly irreplaceable. The grand scheme of things.

There’s not much else that matters, is there?

(If anyone has tips on how to get a teeny-tiny memory card out of a couch without destroying the thing, though, I’d love to hear them…)

 

[Header photo by Hert Niks on Unsplash]