Lord what a day. I began finessing at ten-fifteen. At eleven-thirty I started to write the new pages. I was about two paragraphs in and went to scroll down a little and the entire page turned into asterisks. I had no idea what that was about and panic set in immediately. Suddenly my 369 page document was 133 pages of asterisks. The went to "edit" and undid the last thing. Still asterisks. I undid two more and nothing. I stopped doing that immediately. Then I called the 800 number for Office for Mac. It took me forever to get someone on the phone, then forever for the very foreign person to gather the information she needed. I was hyperventilating by that point and I got truly nasty on the phone. I was finally switched to a tech support person, another person of foreign extraction who was very hard to understand. I told her what had happened. While I was explaining it, all the asterisks turned to little squares. She offered no help other than to say it was a known issue and as long as I'd backed up the document we could retrieve that. I knew that from the start and since the Time Machine had just done a backup while I was talking to her, I knew the previous backup would at least get to where I'd been when I began finessing. Of course, I'd have to then go back and remember all those changes and additions. But I was apoplectic by this point, and I yelled "A KNOWN ISSUE??? TO WHOM??? I didn't know about it and you can't have this happen - why don't you FIX IT!" I told her that she had to figure it out and get my document back. She suggested the issue happened because the document was huge. I suggested she was out of her mind - the document was less than half a megabyte, which is nothing. She had me send her the document file in an e-mail, which I did. While I was attaching the document I could see in the little thumbnail of it that there was typing, so that gave me hope.
She was indeed able to open the document and it was 369 pages so I breathed a sigh of relief. She had me close the weird-looking document and re-open from my document file. It opened and it was there and fine. She then had me go into preferences and check the auto backup feature - which means every time I save it creates an automatic backup in case something bad happens.
When I finally looked at where I'd left off I'd lost the paragraph or two of new stuff, probably because I'd done those three edit undos. I was so upset and I was still shaking and seething - I tried to start writing, but knew I had to just get out and eat and relax, which is what I did. I picked up two packages and am now home. I'll go back and look at the finessed stuff, which should put me back in the right frame of mind to continue writing.
