Found!
Couple of weeks ago I was whining about a nasty side effect of upgrading from Blogger to Blogger Pro.
Somehow, the switch over had blown away one of the really long posts in my archives - one I was kind of attached to, for various reasons (apart from anything else, it was David Weinberger's feedback to an earlier draft of this particular rant that first inspired me to start blogging).
As I didn't think I had an offline draft of this piece I was pretty crushed to find it gone. Not that it's such a fantastic piece of writing or anything, but it weighed heavy with emotional baggage.
I posted a forlorn error report to Blogger Control and then, not really expecting much of a response, I did something incredibly dumb - I went back to the placeholder "BigBody" tag slotted in by Blogger where my essay once was, and posted a snippy little message about how much this sucked.
Stupid. Stupid. Head-smackingly stupid.
As the chap assigned by Blogger support politely pointed out:
"In doing so, the original file was overwritten and replaced with the new post. We are sorry, but we cannot offer any assistance in recovering your original post.
Ahhhh crap.
Course - instead of just accepting my dumbass fate or birching my cretinous hide, I responded with a really quite unpleasantly snarky message about this.
Let the record show, therefore, that Steve of Google/Pyra/Blogger support is a vertiable Demi-God of Customer Service.
Unfazed by my bitter wingeing, he diligently dove back into deep backup, sorting through goodness knows how many grandfathered tapes of blog cruft, to emerge, 10 days later, with the original post restored in all its glory.
Steve: you rock. Official.
Ev, Eric - look after this guy. Far as I'm concerned, he deserves a medal, a pay rise, mondo quantities of stock options, free beer and ice cream for a month, a kiss, a new iPod, my undying gratitude, his own special flavour of Pot Noodle, a shiny red indian rubber ball, and the secret password to the executive massage suite.
Thanks, mate.
