It seems that all of our travel reservations have gone up in smoke. Well, the reservations are still there, but the email confirmations have disappeared. I think gmail really doesn't want us to travel this summer so it has gone and deleted all of the email that had anything to do with us paying for our plane tickets. 3 or 4 in all.

It happened when I labeled them "Travel Reservations" figuring it'd be a good idea to have a quick way to take a look at them. The next morning I went to look something up and they were gone. Hmmm...curious. I decided to search for them using the much touted "search" feature in gmail. Nada. Hmmm, how about the trash folder? Nope, try again. SPAM folder? Nope, not their either.

"WTF?" I'm thinking to myself at this point. I start trying to remember the places I bought tickets from. American Airlines for the Dublin to LAX flight, Northwest (I think) for the LAX to Amsterdam flight, and Aer Lingus (maybe) for the Athens to Dublin flight. Without the confirmation numbers though I'm screwed. Then I remembered spending a while to debug problems with our networked printer at home and had printed everything so we were saved.

Phew...and being the obsessive backup-er that I am, I keep Windows Live Mail Desktop (yes that's the name of the app...and yes, I hate the name) running on my desktop PC at home at all times, quietly sucking down all of my Gmail all day and night. When I got home yesterday, I found that I had not only a hard copy (mental note: print EVERYTHING out), but also a copy of all of the emails sitting in WLMD (not to be confused with the president's WMDs). I could not have imagined a day when Microsoft saved my ass from a bungle over at Google. The world has truly turned upside down.