There are those days when, by your own fault and by those things that happen to you that are completely out of your control, all you can do is scratch your head. I had such a day a couple of weeks ago.

I was having a nice casual dinner, minding my own business, checking text messages. Some fella comes into the restaurant and asks one of the waitresses to find out if anyone drives a gold Sonoma.

I sat there thinking, well, I have a Sonoma. It’s not exactly gold. It’s close, but it’s not gold.

In fact, what color it is is up for debate. Several years ago, my then boss and I went to the ESPN Zone in Atlanta for some Peach Bowl news conference for North Carolina’s John Bunting and Tommy Tuberville of Auburn.

Anyway, I drove and we didn’t get valet parked. But we were in line and the valet fella was asking for our ticket as we were talking to some public relations gal behind us. Behind her were two businessmen who were goofing off on their lunch hour. I said we didn’t get a ticket but I told him my truck was pewter in color.

My boss, a big guy who did a lot of things big and did them well, bellowed, “Pewter? Your truck ain’t pewter. It’s champagne.”

I responded that the car my mother rides in is champagne in color. My truck is pewter. That’s what it said on the little tag inside the driver’s door.

We kept talking to the PR lady. The valet wheels my truck to us.

“That’s champagne,” she said. The two silent businessmen behind us agreed. “Yeah, dude, that’s champagne.”

My boss had a large you-know-what-eating grin on his face.

“Shut up and get in,” I said.

So you can see my own confusion over the color of my vehicle. I figured he might be talking about my ride. I went up and said, “I’ve got a Sonoma, but it ain’t really gold.”

He uttered those magic words: “I think I backed into you.”

We went to the parking lot and sure enough, there was the Sonoma, with a nice crease in the tailgate. Not looking for a protracted hassle just for a dented tailgate, I got his name and all his numbers and said if I decided to get it fixed and filed a claim, I’d call him.

I figured I bought a truck so I could beat the fool out of it. The previous Sonoma had a couple of beauty marks too, so this one, a Christmas present to myself years ago, finally had a nice battle scar after seven years.

Later that evening, back at the office, I was discarding some unneeded files off the desktop of my computer, one of them at least. I emptied the computer trash.

I wondered why it was erasing nearly 6,000 files. Seemed odd.

Eventually, I noticed one of the folders on my desktop was missing — the one that had every sports picture I’ve taken since I’ve been here. This was not good. At all.

The next day I e-mailed our tech gurus, some of whom I’ve known for a very, very long time. No sooner had I sent the e-mail then my phone rang.

In essence, I was being called an idiot for erasing all that stuff. Shoe fits, wear it, I say, and this was a snug 10 1/2.

Since this was a Mac and not a PC, they really couldn’t do anything for me. Sorry.

Some of the pictures survived since they were already on our server. But those that had not been transferred over — and since they had not been burned to CDs after I had been planning to do so for weeks but failed to get around to it — probably were now so much computer dust.

Well, at least the truck runs — sort of.