I often complain in this forum when I’m the victim of poor service. For once, I’d like to praise good service.

I spent part of this morning at the computer, typing a l-o-n-g weblog entry about the time I got the crap beat out of me in high school. I’ve told this story before, but this was going to be the definitive version: I was tying together all the threads that were involved in the story at the time instead of just conveying the barest facts. I was pleased with the results. When I finished, and came out of the Writing Zone, I tried to save the document.

And at that moment, my computer decided to crash.

From my experience, Macs don’t crash very often. Certain applications (ironically, most of them from Apple: Mail, iTunes, iPhoto) crash frequently, but it is rare that the entire system takes a nosedive. It’s never happened before when something important, like this weblog entry, was in the balance.

Rather than panic, I posted an AskMetafilter question looking for help. The responses to the question got me close, but didn’t actually solve my dilemma. Then, out of the blue, I received e-mail from Bare Bones Software, which produces BBEdit, my text editor of choice.

The fellow who contacted me spent several hours exchanging e-mail messages, trying to help me diagnose the problem. Ultimately, we were not able to salvage the lost file. (I was able to take a screenshot of the last half of the document, but the beginning will need to be reconstructed.) That makes me sad, but I’m quite pleased with the excellent customer support that Bare Bones provided.