Chauncy Rucker

Chauncy.Rucker@uconn.edu

Good News

Recently my wife Nancy and I traveled to New York City to get to see our grandson who had just returned from a trip with his parents to France. Our youngest son Chris lives in Manhattan and Jason (older son), Caitlin, his wife, and Arlo Max Rucker (grandson) were able to stay at Chris' loft. It was a glorious 4 days including a one year birthday party for Arlo.

Bad News

We planned to leave NYC for home Thursday morning. Thursday, after taking a bus, the subway, and having lunch, I discovered we didn't have my backpack that held my computer and digital camera. Panic!

We retraced our path, but found no backpack. We called the bus and subway lost and found departments with no luck. It hit me that everything I knew was on that computer, including all the email addresses for the ConnSENSE Letter. I hadn't backed up the data since February and I would need to buy a new computer to even download that old data. Suffer!

Suffer!

Suffer!

Good News again

At home on Saturday I received a call from a Manhattan bus driver who said, "Mr. Rucker, I think I have your computer." A woman had handed the backpack to him on the bus saying, "It was by a youngster in the back of the bus." Fantastic!

We arranged for a Monday morning meeting in Manhattan. He had already let me know that there was no camera in the backpack. I can buy another camera some day, but I could never have recovered the data in the computer. I thanked him profusely and offered him a cash reward, but he refused to take it. As you can imagine, I spent Sunday backing up EVERYTHING to my external hard drive.

Moral

Please back up your data more often than I did!

Irony

This man was "one in a million" and I can't tell you who he was or send a note of thanks to his employer. This all happened when NYC was under heightened security. The policy on buses and the subway was "If you see a backpack or any other suspicious looking container, turn it over to the police. The police will then explode the backpack without first checking it's content." The bus driver violated Homeland Security policy to help me!

PS

The gentleman told me that when he checked my back pack for a phone number, he noticed that I had something to do with people with disabilities. He said children from a school for the deaf often ride his bus. He wondered if I could give him help in learning sign language or at least learning some of the most common signs. I'm providing him some URL's, but if you have great ideas, I'd love to hear from you.