Flexibility

We woke up in the middle of the night and couldn't get back to sleep.  We were worried about the connections lost by our Windows reboot - without URLs and passwords, we were separated from our cash money and from our life savings, in other words, our very survivability seemed at stake.  And without access to our creditors, we wouldn't be able to pay bills and reconcile balances, threatening our credit and access to goods and services. 

In the dark of the bedroom, the problem seemed nearly insurmountable.  We imagined all of the challenges and impediments we would face trying to recreate all the lost connections.  For example, the pay site for the unsellable condo's monthly homeowner fees were paid through the association website, and our long-forgotten account name, a string of random letters and numbers, had been assigned to us years ago in a long-lost letter and stored online until yesterday's reboot.  Without the account name, we couldn't request a new password, and without a new password, we couldn't pay the fees.  

We started the search in earnest this morning, and it turned out to be surprisingly easy.  We first connected with our bank and our IRA so we wouldn't lose track of our savings.  One major anxiety resolved.  We did have to call the big international mega-bank to restore access to our IRA, but it was quick and painless (they answered the call and connected us immediately with a rep, without any long on-hold waits).  We then rebooted our Outlook and on-line email accounts to facilitate communicating with the rest of the world again, and then our credit cards, and so on.  

We got at least 50% of our accounts restored in less than two hours, and those were the accounts we figured would be the most challenging to restore, including the condo homeowner site (as it turns out, it recognized our IP address and restored the lost user name before we even had to ask).

And thank goodness for Steam!  It stored all of those games we had spent our hard-earned money on, and when prompted, it downloaded Metal Gears Solid V for us at the exact spot we were at before the troubles began.

As is so often the case, our worry and sleeplessness were for nothing.  There are a few accounts still left to restore, household utilities and mortgages, but they're all easy and shouldn't be a problem when the time comes.

As it is, our computer is running better than ever on the new OS - smoother and faster - so the whole "ordeal" was probably worth it after all.  

And we learned a lesson once again about anxiety and worrying about things that might happen instead of things that are actually happening.