Crying over spilt milk

[Alpha]

EDIT: Please move to GC. And don't ask why I keep accidentally putting threads in the wrong place.

Just then, I was typing away on word, summarising a journal article I had just read.

At the same time, I am attempting to install 19gb of software (a huge mother ****ing statistical package), which made things a little volatile.

I was pretty engrossed in it, when everything froze up. I realised I hadn't saved, and tried using my limited (that's being generous) knowledge of computers to save it from annihilation. Most of my hopes rested on an auto-recovery, which didn't eventuate.

It wasn't a lot of written text, but it represented a lot of text I had read and thought about; so it was still considerable work.

When I lost it, I was pretty pissed off. But I told myself that it was just spilt milk, and either way I would still have to re-type it. So I started to. It's faster doing it a second time, but I actually noticed that I had a better appreciation of what the author was arguing, and picked up that what I thought the text was about was in fact pretty wrong.

So, by resigning to my fate and 'wiping up the spilt milk', I actually came out with better work, at the cost of some minor frustration.

How do you react to such 'spilt milk'? It could be like a forum post you are writing that is lost when you accidentally close a tab. Do you give up? Punch something? Make something even better?