Gone baby gone

Yesterday was not a good day. Oh shit are the only 2 words that come to mind.

Yesterday afternoon, the program I use to operate the entire library froze up. Weird technology stuff happens all the time, right? I try to do all these fixes and none of them work. I do the ultimate and shut my entire system and machine off and start all over again with a reboot. Only this time when the software opens and I click on the tab marked "circulation" I get an error message. As a matter of fact, I get an error message over and over and over again on each tab I click.

I call the school system's head librarian to see if she knows what's up. I tell her the error code and she flips out and tells me to call the software company's tech support. I call tech support and they tell me the error code means 1 of 2 things:
1- human interaction has screwed my system up
2- the system needs rebooted from our server or our network.
And what does the error code mean, you might be asking. Oh... well... the error code means that the library program has been removed/ deleted.

Yes, you read that right. GONE. G.O.N. E. As in no longer there. As in ALL the library data has been deleted, removed, vanished.

As in all records of books, of the patrons, of the circulation history, or patron holdings, EVERYTHING is gone. All I have are the books on the shelf. There is no record of them in any system anywhere.

Oh. My. Fucking. Shit.

This means that if our IT staff can't find the program on the server or on the network, then I have nothing. I will have to hand enter each and every book, one at a time, all over again. I will have to reconfigure all the software and the settings, enter all the patron information as well as the books.

To make matters worse, once I told my principal what happened, he told me that they caught kids messing around with the program and he thinks they might have deleted it when they got caught doing what they weren't supposed to do, and they accidentally deleted the library stuff while deleting their own stuff, trying to cover their tracks.

We called the IT department at work and they are seeing what they can do. They're trying to see if it exists on a server or network somewhere.

I can't even fathom what will happen next...

Mags