RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, I need to address something here. I meant to do this at the beginning of the program and I was so excited to get back and had so many things to talk about that it slipped my mind until just now. Last Thursday I was out on the golf course with the reprobate golf buddies, and I get this panicked e-mail from the IT people for the website that apparently there was a crash. The whole site just crashed. And even though I was taking the day off, they thought that I should know about it since it’s RushLimbaugh.com. So I fired back and said, ‘What the hell happened? How does a whole website crash?’ Well, it turned out it was human error. As crazy as it sounds, the whole website was accidentally deleted. In our system — which is going to change — in our system there is a single keystroke that can wipe out the entire website, and it did, the free side. It wiped out the free side. It wiped out the Essential Stack of Stuff. It was just gone in an attempt to update the site the night before. It was just gone.
Fortunately, we had it backed up, and we had the latest edition of it backed up. Now, when I got home and I had some time, I checked e-mails and there were hundreds of thousands of e-mails from people who didn’t know what had happened. But they could not log on. And some of them logged on and got a site that was two years old. I mean it was all screwed up. We have it backed up every day. It took us awhile to restore it because we didn’t know what happened at first. They didn’t know that it was a deletion, thought it might be a server problem. So once the problem was diagnosed, the back-up happened pretty quick. We’re still working on getting some of the Essential Stack of Stuff back. That is a huge file. The Essential Stack of Stuff is what makes Rush Limbaugh an encyclopedia. That’s worth more than two years of college, especially with what’s being taught in colleges, it’s worth more than four years in high school. But it just again shows you, it happened to us, it just shows you the importance of backing things up.
Do you realize if we had not been able to restore this, we would have had to start from square one and rebuild the whole thing. And this can happen to you at home. If you don’t have your hard drive backed up on your little PC, this thing — and, you know, as important as my website is to me and all of us, and the work it would be, imagine if every piece of vital information or very important family information, photos, what have you, was on your hard drive, and it got zapped, you accidentally deleted it all or the hard drive blows up. Do not let it happen to you. You do not want to go through what we went through. It was about 36 hours to get this up and running. (interruption) Why are you first hearing about it now? Because you weren’t boss last week when it happened, Snerdley. He wants to know why he’s only hearing about this now. He’s boss for the day. You were boss today. We got it fixed without you being boss. We had it fixed when I was boss. Most bosses don’t hear anything ’til it’s too late anyway so don’t sweat it. I didn’t hear about it until after they finally figured out they had no choice but than to tell me. That’s the way this stuff works, but we were panicking. This is a little plug here for Carbonite.com. It really will save so much aggravation. Carbonite.com, just go to the website, log in, Carbonite.com, check the offer code ‘Rush’ and it will explain all this. You do not want to lose whatever is on your hard drive. It’s just as important to you as anything that any business has on its computers.