juiced pilot

[exponentialdk]

Over the past 36 hours, I actually got a reasonable amount of sleep, albeit fragmented. I've accomplished only one thing that I had intended to do yesterday, and that was sending a single email message (finally done this morning). I spent much of yesterday on the phone for work.

You know those characters portayed in painful movies, who are so superhumanly clumsy that everything they touch goes wrong? I felt like that yesterday. One of the reasons I got enough sleep last night is that sleep felt like the only safe thing I could do.

Some of the highlights:

• I had a cup of juice blend on my desk. When I took a drink, I somehow sloshed it over the brim and into my keyboard. White keyboard + red, sugary fluid = bad combination. I spent the next 5 minutes cleaning the keyboard.
  
  
• Just as I finished cleaning up from the previous mess, I put some pressure on the lower left corner of that keyboard. The keyboard was sitting on top of some papers, so the depression of one corner caused the elevation of the opposite corner. The keyboard is on a keyboard tray, so when the corner moved up, it pressed against the bottom of the desk surface behind it. The key in the upper right corner ejects the CD drive. And guess where the (still-nearly-full) cup of beverage was?
  
  This soaked my clothes, my desk chair, much of my mail, some of my tax records, the air cleaner, various other things in my room, and (of course) the floor.
  
  
• Just as I finished cleaning up from the previous mess, my sleeve caught the somehow-not-quite-empty cup of beverage, and knocked it off a corner of the desk. It fell 29 inches to the floor, where the remaining very-red liquid sprayed across my bedroom, getting into the sheets, the mattress, my clothes, my courier bag, almost every part of the aforementioned air cleaner (still opened from the previous de-messing) and a lot more. Several drops had extremely good aim in arcing up to clear one obstacle and coming down through a narrow opening in another, to damage an autographed hard-cover book.
  
  And while I was cleaning that up, I noticed that my Palm Pilot was sitting in a puddle. Unfortunately, the pilot's battery was fully charged at the time. "It's dead, Jim."