Dominique is the one everyone calls. Her mother, her little cousin, her best friend's husband who just started a business — when anybody in her circle has a tech problem, Dominique is the first and only call, and she picks up. She has walked people through router resets over the phone with the patience of somebody who genuinely likes fixing things, and she is right, almost every time, on the first try.
Fifteen years of client work — contracts, invoices, years of correspondence, the actual paper trail of her whole career — lives in one laptop and one email account. She knows exactly where everything is. She has never once lost a file.
That is not a system. That is a streak, and streaks are not something you can point to when someone asks what your backup plan is.
Ask her about backups and she'll tell you, genuinely unbothered, that she's careful. She doesn't click weird links. She doesn't download from anywhere sketchy. All true, and none of it is the point — a coffee spill doesn't check whether you click weird links first, Mama, and a stolen laptop bag on the train doesn't care how careful you've been for fifteen years straight. Care prevents one category of disaster. It does nothing at all against the much larger category of disasters that have nothing to do with judgment — hardware failure, theft, a liquid spill, a fire, a phone stolen out of a coat pocket.
What This Actually Costs Her
The cost isn't visible yet, which is exactly the problem — it's sitting entirely in the future, in the one afternoon her laptop doesn't turn back on. Everything she has ever built for a client, every contract that would prove she delivered what she said she would, exists in exactly one place. Not two. One.
And because nothing has gone wrong yet, there's no urgency attached to fixing it — urgency, for Dominique, only shows up after the loss, which is precisely the moment it's too late to be useful. She is the most tech-capable person in every room she's in, and she is one spilled cup of coffee away from having to rebuild fifteen years of receipts from memory.
Picture the actual Tuesday it happens: the laptop won't wake up, the repair shop gives her a timeline measured in days not hours, and a client calls that same afternoon asking for an invoice from eighteen months ago for their own tax purposes. There is no second copy to check. There is only Dominique, trying to reconstruct a paper trail from memory and a client's own records, for a business relationship that's about to look a lot less professional than it actually is.
The Questions I Would Ask Dominique
1️⃣ If your laptop didn't turn on tomorrow morning, where is the second copy of everything on it — and be honest, is the real answer 'there isn't one'?
2️⃣ You've fixed dozens of other people's tech problems. When's the last time you looked at your own setup with that same suspicion?
3️⃣ What would it actually cost you — in hours, in money, in client trust — to rebuild what's on that laptop from scratch, today, if you had to?
Being the person everyone calls for help is not the same as being covered yourself. Only one of those is optional, and it isn't the one she's been skipping.
The Baddie Stack Prescription 💅🏾📱⌨️
🔐 Automated, redundant backups. Everything on that laptop copied automatically, on a schedule, to somewhere that isn't the same physical device — so a spilled drink or a stolen bag stops being a career event and starts being a Tuesday inconvenience she solves by picking up a different device and picking up exactly where she left off. Set up once, it asks nothing of her ever again — no reminder to run it, no folder to remember to drag files into, just a quiet copy happening on a schedule in the background of a life that already has enough things demanding attention.
📦 A real client-records archive. Contracts and invoices pulled out of one inbox and into a system built to hold them, searchable and provable, instead of living entirely in her memory of which folder she meant to make. The difference shows up the day a client asks for something from three years ago — instead of scrolling, she searches a name and has an answer in the time it takes to type it.
🧰 A tested recovery plan. Not just backups sitting untouched — an actual, once-a-year confirmation that restoring from them really works, so the first time she finds out is not the day she needs it most.
This breakdown can be customized with a Digital Systems Scan
Dominique doesn't need to become the client she's used to being the expert for. She just needs the same coverage she's been giving everybody else, finally pointed at her own laptop.
Take the 4-minute Digital Literacy Assessment to see where your setup actually stands: Start
Then connect with me directly. I will help you build the backup you've been meaning to set up for fifteen years.
Stay Savvy, Baddies 💅🏾.
Tech Baddie Out.