On Friday, something really weird happened to me, something, which still doesn’t make any sense to me. But let me tell you:

A few weeks ago I was invited by the European Youth Forum (YFJ) to attend their “MDG information and training day” in Bonn (the former capital of Germany) as a resource person on the MDGs. I was first supposed to just co-present on the topic “Youth and the MDGs” with Leif Holmberg, bureau member of the YFJ, but in the last week before the event I was asked if I could give two more presentations, one about the MDGs more broadly (I called it “The Millennium Development Goals – Opportunities and Challenges”) and one about advocacy for the MDGs (“Advocating for the MDGs – the birth of a new global movement”). As A friend of mine was visiting me last week for a couple of days, I had no time to prepare any of the presentations though, so I ended up working on them during my train ride to Bonn.

I spent about 1 hour on my part of the MDG and Youth presentation when it was almost done – I just wanted to add a few screenshots to it. But for some strange reason Powerpoint didn’t want to add them. So I saved the document and restarted Powerpoint – nothing. Then I restarted my whole computer. But after that, I suddenly couldn’t open the document anymore. Instead the program gave me the error message “this file can’t be open as it is either corrupted, in use or the program doesn’t support this kind of file” (something along these lines). It was very strange, but whatever I tried, it didn’t work, so before loosing even more time, I reconstructed the whole presentation :-(

When I arrived in Bonn, I had a meeting with the organizers and we then went to have dinner. After dinner, the event was opened with “ice-breakers” (some of them were actually really funny games – I had great fun!). However, it wasn’t until 11pm that I could eventually sit down with Leif to finish the presentation and finalize also my two other ones. At 1:30am we were finally ready though and Leif went to his room. And now it happened, what I still have no explanation for: After Leif had left, I saved all the files (I’m 100% sure I did), left my laptop on the bed and went to the bathroom. When I returned, the file with my presentation had strangely disappeared!!! I was utterly confused as you can imagine – how can a file just disappear? But the place where I had saved it on my desktop was suddenly empty – there was nothing than a big hole. I started searching on my whole laptop for the file (luckily I have a Mac with Tiger, which makes searching for files thanks to Spotlight so much easier), but the only file that I could find gave me the same error message than the one I created in the train that afternoon – and I’m not even sure that it was that file (I also searched for auto recovery files etc, but to no avail).

Luckily, when I was just looking for the file, Leif called again to ask when he should wake me up (my presentation was at 9 am and he knew that I have a hard time getting up so early in the morning ;-) I told him what happened and he said he would come down to my room immediately. But even with his help, we couldn’t find the file again and the corrupted file didn’t want to open on his laptop either. In my desperation, I even tried calling Mike in Toronto, who had helped me many times before with computer troubles and who I knew can do magic when it comes to technology. And in fact, after sending him the file, he was able to retrieve the information, but he told me that the file only contained two slides – how weird!

So basically, there was nothing I could do. The only file that we found on my laptop was corrupted and contained only two slides (another reason why it probably wasn’t the right file: it said that it had last been changed around 12 pm), while the real file had completely disappeared!! I’m still trying to come up with a logical solution that would make sense to me, but so far it is still a total mystery to me.

The presentation went nevertheless very well though. I went to bed at around 2:30 am that night (although I was so confused that I couldn’t sleep until 3:30 am), but thanks to Leif’s help I was able to reconstruct the whole presentation the next morning.

It was very crazy though; I got up at 7 am, started my first presentation at 9 am, presented – with breaks - until lunch at 1 pm and then after lunch co-moderated a policy discussion on aid and debt. When I stood up from my chair after this policy discussion meeting and spilled my whole bottle of water on the carpet I knew – it’s time for me to sleep!!

It’s still surprising though how you can even with just a few hours of sleep be fully present if you have to. It all depends on your mind – I had to be fit to present, so I was able to do it. But after my responsibilities were over, I collapsed immediately.

Anyway, I wanted to share this little story about my presentation with you – maybe some of you had similar experiences already? Although, I doubt that disappearing files are a very common phenomenon…