Bad day in the life of an auditor

Do you know that feeling when you accidentally deleted something you should and couldn’t recover it? This happened to me yesterday when I deleted all the audit notes and findings by mistake, with the report being due until today's early morning.

I still don’t know how it happened, but I used VS Code’s LineNote extensions to mark and note interesting parts of the code. I got information from the client. They did some minor updates on the repo, and I decided to pull the changes. I did this a million times and never lost line notes, but yesterday was different. During the pull, I needed to remove any changes made to the repo, so without thinking, I reverted every change using VS Code’s Github extension, and all my notes were gone. But I didn’t realise that until 30 minutes later where I was about to put all my findings into a report.

I can’t remember what I did in the meantime, but when I realized what the hell has happened, I fanatically was pressing CMD+Z to undo any changes, but the magic key combination didn’t help here. I went full panic and frustration mode. I spent 2 hours trying to recover my notes, and I failed. I downloaded some software to recover lost data, that didn’t help, but it helped me recover one photo I accidentally deleted 1 year ago…

Time was ticking, and the report needed to be written. Luckily, codebase wasn’t that big, and I read that morning all the findings, so recreating them wasn’t much of a problem, but the frustration and panic I had were wearisome, especially when I had some major findings in those notes.

I didn’t go to sleep early that day. It was 2AM where I worked since 8AM previous day's 😩 Report turned out great, and all major issues were laid out in the report, and nothing was omitted.

I don’t have any wisdom at the end of this experience apart from the fact mistakes do happens, bad day do happen to all of us. Because of the mistakes and errors we make, we learn and grow. Let’s not contemplate our past mistakes or simple things like that and let that ruin the rest of the day or the week. Look forward to the next day and how you can improve.

Everyone can have a bad day, and that’s ok.