Have hired virus killing ninjas and declared war on corruption

Just handed the desktop over to professionals who promised to clean it up and get it back to me by Tuesday.

I'll almost certainly wind up replacing it with a laptop within the next 6 months, but I'm not ready to do it now, so it's worth it to me to throw money at the geeks and let them figure it out. I'm sure that all my R/L friends who have heard me bitching about this non-stop since Sunday night will now breathe a sigh of relief.

But handing the machine over was a bit traumatic. I would honestly have rather walked in to that shop naked than have to deal with the fact that the techs will be looking at what's on that hard drive. The desktop has years of writing--novels both sold and unsold. My internet bookmarks. Spreadsheets with financial data. Years of email. Digital photo libraries--a mix of innocuous vacation shots and those saved for potential blackmail when one of my friends achieves fame & fortune. Checking out the hard drive will tell them as much (if not more) about me as they'd learn from walking through my house and rifling through my things.

I try to console myself with the thought that these guys do this for a living, they've probably seen everything and are heartily bored of it. And do I really care if they mock my taste in music or that picture of me stalking the B-Mets mascot? Still, I'm twitchy. The sooner the machine is fixed and back in my hands, the sooner I can start pretending this never happened.