"Conspicuous Absence..."

The old saying, "You never miss something until it's gone," has plagued me for the past couple of weeks. Now that my eyesight has been surgically corrected, I have no need to constantly ask my wife, "Have you seen my glasses?" And I have managed to adopt a pretty fail proof method of keeping up with the keys to my vehicle; I place them next to the coffeemaker each night before I retire for the evening. Life overall can be pretty stress free if one applies oneself to either learning to regiment oneself to a set routine, or like me, just say "The hell with it!" and go with the flow. However, there are those times in one's life where no matter how carefully one plots out one's next move, everything goes to hell in the proverbial hand basket.

That was the case a couple of weeks ago when my computer decided to go on the fritz and left me abandoned and removed from access to the cyberworld of self-indulgent mass communications. Priding myself on being able to out think a stubborn piece of hardware, I made numerous attempts to eradicate the gremlins lurking deep within the bowels of the equipment only in the end to be time and time frustrated with the far less than satisfactory results. Finally the infernal machine decided "enough was enough" and refused to even provide me with a monitor screen from which I could further attempt to overcome its refusal to cooperate. With another mighty utterance of expletives deleted, I gave up on my quest to again prove that man could conquer machine and delivered it to my "on call" computer guru.

After initially enduring a prolonged and painful interlude of chastisement for my having waited until the problem became a whole series of potential problems, computer guru Rick performed a series of quick diagnostics and announced, "Why here's the problem," in that tone of voice that suggested that if I possessed even one ounce less of common sense I would be unable to extract myself from a broom closet. My response to him was something on the order that if everyone was as knowledgeable about how to fix their own computers he'd be out on the sidewalk selling pencils. He couldn't argue with that type of profound logic. So as to make his time and effort a paying enterprise, I acquiesced to computer guru Rick's suggestion that I leave the machine with him a couple of days so that he could "thoroughly tune up it's innars." Three days and $90.00 later, I am back in possession on my computer that now once again behaves like a well discipline child.

Hopefully the always demanding and time consuming holiday season that in now officially upon us will leave some personal time so that I may get back to the enjoyable routine of banging out a few post to this blog...for better or for worse. Now, if I could just locate where I put my wine glass, I'm good to go.