Wednesday night I wrote this dandy blog, a laugh a minute, and giggled all the way through. I’d read it one more time and sent it off to my full-of-sunshine editor in the morning, who would pull her glasses down to the tip of her nose and say, “Well, done, Gail. You rocked this one.” She is my confidence builder, and I can always count on her to lift my morale and keep me going. I saved my work in the usual manner, happy with what I had written and my plan for Thursday. I’d send off the blog and write all day. It would keep me happy and maybe I would be able to convince the cowboy to take me out to dinner. It would be a great Thursday.
Thursday morning, I got up, as usual and looked out the door. Fifty degrees. No snow. Blue skies. My ideal day was waiting. I stretched a bit, no new aches and pains and sighed as I gulped down a couple of Tylenol, just in case. Ah, it would be a perfect day.
I turned on my computer and entered my password. Nothing. I looked at my up-to-date Password Sheet and tried again. It was correct, but my computer wanted verification, “We want to know if this is really you.” Well, who else would it be, Dummy? You sent a weird looking word to my phone which I typed in. Then it sent me another message, “You’ve used this password too many times, so change it.” I struck the computer squarely in the nose and scowled, “You created it and sent it, so how could I have used it too many times?”
I like my old password. It’s easy to remember and I can type it quickly, but you know computers. They think like toads, are obstinate and rude. The computer wasn’t about to renege and let me use my old password, so I poured another cup of coffee while I tried to come up with a new one that would pass password muster. The screen now showed a bunch of new requirements, capital letter, small letter, number in the middle of the password, any character except “!@#$%^&*()” and no letters that form a word. Not my name, rank, or serial number and most of all, not something I could remember. Ugh. Reboot, maybe it would cooperate. Bingo, but I still needed a new password. I typed in a new one, PASSword1. A reboot, new password and I was in business. Hurrah!
I have a file folder on my computer that holds all my blogs for 2022, about a hundred, and hit the file icon. I received a message, “There is nothing in this file. It may have been moved or deleted.” What? I had been asleep all night. Who would have moved or deleted it? That couldn’t be true, after all, I had written a great blog, a masterpiece, and my blog readers would be laughing all day. I was on the verge of tears when Cowboy Bob walked by, “What’s the matter?” I told him my woes and turned it over to him. He called his computer-savvy son, who said, “Computers get old, Dad, and Gail uses it a lot, so look at a new one.”
My computer is only five years old. We compute dogs’ ages by multiplying the years times seven, but how do we figure computer ages? Times twenty? Was my computer a hundred?
I needed to find my very clever blog, so off we went to the big blue computer store. The impatient-with-seniors computer expert hit a few buttons, frowned, and said, “Sorry, Ma’am, it went into the inner depths of cyber space,” I was up a proverbial creek. What would I do?
“Let’s look at new computers while we are here” the cowboy said, just as he started pushing buttons all over my old computer, maybe encouraging it to wake up. HELLO! The computer groaned and all kinds of flashing lights and words flashed across the screen. There it was: my blog.
“There it is! What happened?” I said to the expert.
“It fixed itself. It does that sometimes.” So much for the experts.
So, the rest of the story, in the words of Paul Harvey, is that I sent my very funny, very clever blog to my editor. She said, “Nix, Honey Bunny, (that’s what my mean editor calls me when she’s disappointed), write a new blog. It isn’t funny.”
Today’s Tuesday and I’m looking forward to a perfect week. So far, so good!
MORE:
It’s November, Christmas is just around the corner and I’m running a sale for my books, the whole series: Cruise Time, Out of Time, Wasting Time, and Bits of Time. All in one neat and tidy bundle, autographed, and ready to read. Check the website gailcushman.com Code word is slowpoke. Now what do I do with all this Halloween candy?
