Arm Wrestling Technology

Oh, the irony that I work in IT. I'd like to say that I have an "electric personality" or some such quality that causes electric devices of any kind to short out and behave unpredictably when I'm nearby. As I regularly represent IT Application Enhancements to the business leaders in my company, I personally demonstrate that there are far worse things than performance issues or reports that don't reconcile. Those can be explained. But why I might be the only person in the room to lose network access, innocently stumble upon an undiscovered bug in MS Project during a training, or make an online reservation in Outlook for a meeting room only to discover that it has been inexplicably triple-booked, this can only boil down to one of two things: a) I was meant for a job in QA, or 2) these are simply classic examples of ID:10-T errors.

I say all this to explain why I have not yet managed to post any photos of my home on this blog, as promised. I can assure you, images of my surroundings and all the various stages through which they've gone as I've decorated, rearranged and gardened sit neatly organized in an album in iPhoto on my Mac. I have been loyal to Macintosh computers since my days at the University, when I became snobbishly devoted to their graphic arts superiority. I also found them at that time to be far more user friendly and intuitive than PC's. I actually considered myself rather quickly adaptive to new software at that time. But now I feel betrayed as I fail to figure out the key to simply uploading an image to my blog.

I may have landed on the best argument for needing a man.

My Pledge to Ants

I made some interesting discoveries today in my kitchen. First, those few ants I saw yesterday wandering my sink were, in fact, the more directionally challenged brothers and sisters of the legion who had discovered the bin of cat food under my sink. Having no bug spray at hand, I grabbed the closest bottle of cleaning spray where I was crouched, Pledge MultiSurface, at which point I made my second discovery: Pledge kills ants! Viola! Now, this is my kind of multitasking: Ridding my home of tiny thieves and cleaning all at once. As I followed the trail along the underside of my counter top, down the corner to the baseboards leading through my dining room and living room, all the way to a tiny crack under my window, I misted the Pledge with delight at their instant paralysis. Several thoughts entered my mind then, while I retraced my steps back to kitchen to get some paper towels,
"I bet this is way more environmentally friendly than bug spray, and it smells better, too! Man,look at all these dead ants...isn't there some band named And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead? Hmph. Here me, ants! You will know meeee by the trail of your little dead ant friends, and you will never return! ...That kinda makes me sad. Poor little guys. Imagine stumbling upon such mayhem and tragedy. I wonder if they're even aware of me. I mean, they don't seem to look up. Maybe to them it's just like a sudsy hurricane. Hmph. Actually, if this stuff kills ants, it may not be such a good thing to be spraying around. Oh well, at least it smells good..."