No one can do anything about this, but I feel like venting anyway. Back
on September 27 I started scanning a book Danger Trail by Max Brand.
It's a western and not the type of book I would ordinarily read, but it
was on hand and was not in the Bookshare collection. So I decided to
work on it anyway. I wish I hadn't. It was a very difficult scan.
Because it was so difficult I have been scanning it one page at a time
and proofreading each page before I went on to the next page. It is an
old mass market paperback with very yellowed pages. So there are a lot
of scanning errors and a lot of corrections to do. It also appears that
when it was printed the printing press was running low on ink. A lot of
the words are very dim and a lot of words are incomplete and I have had
to figure out what they are through context. Very often I have had to
scan a page over and over to figure it out. There are some pages that I
spent nearly two hours on. That is, I have spent whole scanning sessions
working on a single page. Today I was down to less than forty pages to
go. At the rate I have been making my way through this I was not
expecting to finish either today or in the next several days, but I was
close enough that I was beginning to feel like the end was in sight and
I was looking forward to finishing it. Then without warning a thunder
storm was upon me. That is a bit unusual around here this far into
October and it was totally unexpected. I knew that it was raining
outside, but I knew nothing about any thunder storm until a very loud
clap of thunder erupted right over top of me. I started scrambling to
get my computer shut down. I had to close my Open Book software and
disconnect my modem. My cable modem does not have a surge protector and
my computer got zapped through it once before. I am not sure what
happened. I am thinking that perhaps in my hurry I might have cut the
power before Open Book was quite shut down. But when the storm had
passed and I booted up everything to resume my work there was absolutely
no sign of Danger Trail. I lost every bit of work I had done on that
book over the last month. That happened to me once before when I was
scanning a 500 or so page book and had four pages to go. In that case
the scan was relatively easy and so I started over on it and finally
completed it. This time, though, the book was a very difficult scan and
I just don't have the will to start all over. I won't even find out how
the book ends. It is a fairly predictable western though. So that I can
just about predict that there is going to be a shoot out between the
good guys and the bad guys and the kidnapped fair damsel, Molly, will be
rescued. Nevertheless, an entire month of arduous work has just been
blown. This is the kind of thing that makes me feel like just quitting
as a Bookshare volunteer.
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