VERY bad day at the office

I decided that today was the 3rd worst day of my life. Today I woke up at 6 am to get some work done that I needed to finish before 8:00 so that I could be in Alameda by 9:00. So I go to open my client's file and it won't open. So I get QuickBooks tech support on the phone and an hour later my hard drive quits working. I take the external hard drive to my client, that owns a computer repair place, all day long I hear nothing, maybe they just haven't gotten to it, I keep thinking. Finally at 4:30 I call them to see what's going on. They have run recovery software on it, and my hard drive is shot! WHAT?!?!? I have 30 clients entire financial information stored on there! This can't be happening. Oh but it his, he ever so calmly tells me. SCCREECH! CRASH! I freeze, thinking it was my business falling down around me, nope, just the 6 cars in front of me that I have to swerve around at 60 miles per hour. Whew! At least I missed that!

Needless to say, I had a REALLY bad night. Nothing that 1/2 a pint of Ben and Jerry's couldn't fix. So my options are, tomorrow take it out to a friend's house that is going to try something else to recover the data, or else, send it to someplace in TX and for anywhere from $900-$3900 get it recovered from them. So tomorrow I should have a better idea. If it can't be recovered, I figure it's going to cost me around $10,000 to redo the work that is lost. Plus, any lost revenue from work that can't be done while this is being fixed and any clients that fire me because of it.