If You Give a TC a Computer

It's 8:50, and N has camp tomorrow. I need to get him into bed early; these 10 pm bedtimes aren't going to cut it when he's running around in a park from 9 til 4.

"N...Go get in PJs!"

Oh, right. I need to Goggle Map the park the camp is in, because it's not around here, and I've never been there before.

Firefox opens up to my homepage, which is my work web-access email box. There are three unread messages. The first one requires a response, the second one requires filing into a pending box, the third one requires me to go into our administrative tools and fix a problem.

Oooh, I really should go check the other two work-related inboxes I'm responsible for.

One of the two is empty, but the other has seven messages that need to be dealt with. I deal with them.

That reminds me; I never did get an email back from that customer support place I'd dropped a line to yesterday. Or did I?

I switch over to my personal email account, which is an entirely different application. One friend has sent me a link to a funny video, which I click on and watch. Another has sent a long note that requires a reply, and so I write that up. Her note reminds me that I needed to touch base with another friend about plans we have for next week, so I write that one up, too.

And, oh, I never sent Bill that invoice for the freelance work I did.

I write up the invoice, attach it to an email, and go to send it off to Bill. But Bill's email address doesn't just pop up on my screen when I start to type it; I realize that I've never added him to my address book. So I search around for one of his emails to me, grab his contact info off the bottom of it, and make up a contact card. The name above his reminds me that I wanted to check my friend's blog, so go over to my dashboard and hit the Bloglines widget there, which takes me to my Bloglines feed, where I click on her blog so I can see if she's updated. She hasn't, but I notice that a few of my other favorite reads have, so I go to check those out.

Eventually, I close up my Firefox and start to rise from my chair, but then I see that that email to Bill--the one with the invoice--is still sitting on my desktop, so I finish filling in the email address and send that off. I see that my friend has replied to my earlier email, so I go to read that, and end up sending off another reply to her. Then I notice that my email box is really full, and I decide I need to clear it out a bit. I start clicking and filing away, when suddenly I hear Baroy from the living room:

"N, you really do need to be in bed already."

I look up at the clock. It's 9:52, more than an hour since I'd come in here to get directions to camp in the morning. An hour since I remembered that I was supposed to put my child to bed. An hour, to be honest, since I remembered that he exists.

"N! Go brush your teeth, and I'll be there in two minutes," I call out. "I just need to print out some directions."

As I start to open my Firefox again, I think to myself, "What an idiot I am," followed immediately by, "but this would make a great blog entry..."

The good news? I did walk away from the computer and put N to bed before sitting down to type this. But those directions? Still haven't made it over to Google Maps. And the smart money says I never will.