Copyright © 2003 Henrietta W. Hay
A Bad Week
July 11, 2003
Some days it hardly pays to get out of bed. Well, let's make that some
weeks. Like last week.
When a woman who grew up in the days of pencils and manual typewriters
practically has a nervous breakdown because her computer has a nervous
breakdown, the world has definitely progressed far beyond her
childhood. It was not a major tragedy when my Mac quit in the middle of
last week's column, but it seemed like it. I knew that there were
several ways to get the column in to the paper -- not on the usual
deadline, but before the final one. But the breakdown was definitely
hard on the nervous system -- mine.
And then I woke up the next morning with bees in my bedroom. Not the
belfry, the bedroom. They were tiny little creatures and I don't know
yet what brand of bees they were. Fortunately, most of them were dead.
But not all. One of them resented my putting on my sock and stung my
foot before I even saw it. Then later I was so concerned for Mercury
the Wonder Cat when I saw him leering at something on the floor that I
reached down to rescue him and got it in the finger. Mercury is fine.
But the finger that got stung was the middle one, which makes it
impossible to display it for sympathy. The bee crisis was further
complicated by the fact that I had eye surgery recently and am still
seeing little black spots. So it was very difficult to tell the
difference between a bee and an innocent spot.
The next day I got a jury summons.
And to polish it off, I had a dental appointment.
The most serious, of course, was the computer break-down.
We have this wonderful machine, the personal computer, which expands
knowledge beyond our wildest dreams, and makes communication easy. My
Mac is a gateway to the world and my regular means of communication with
my kids.
The first thing I do in the morning, even before coffee, is check for
e-mail. Who knows, Hillary might be inviting me to lunch. Or maybe
not. In any case last week, no e-mail, Internet. I wanted to verify a
coffee date with a friend. No e-mail. I wanted to know whether son
Dave would be headed for Canada next week. No e-mail. I wanted to
check on son John's golf tournament. No e-mail. I couldn't check in
with friend Terry as I do each morning. No e-mail. Then I wanted to
do my daily scan of the New York Times. No Internet. I wanted to know
how to spell Machu Picchu, where a friend of mine is headed this week.
No Internet.
Eventually, thanks to my favorite Mac guru, a friendly guy from the Mac
Users Group and the Sentinel, we got Mac running.
A day without bees in the house was very welcome. Once I cleaned up a
hundred or so tiny corpses, there haven't been any more. Now I just
have to figure out how they got in.
The Jury Commissioner agreed with me that an 89 year old juror who
can't hear and forgets now and then cannot be fair to either side.
And my dentist has a new office with big windows. I lay there on a new
soft chair and watched the little white clouds wander back and forth
over a perfect Colorado blue sky while I got the cleanest teeth in town
and, "Look ma, no cavities."
So all in all things have settled down pretty well. Maybe it wasn't
such a bad week after all. No bees and a working Mac. Mercury the
Wonder Cat has settled down into his usual routine of supervising a
household without bees. And I can get up each morning, and dash in to
see whether Hillary wants to go to lunch.