Isn't it always the way?

I finally finished this long term project I'd been working on. Or that I was talking about working on. That I was planning to work on at some point and moaning about in the meantime.

Yes, that project.

I worked all weekend in fact -- except for an hour and a half at the Memorial Day Parade in the neighborhood (in the rain) -- finishing up at 1:00am or so, smugly satisfied that I had done my best with the material provided. Despite myself.

I emailed everything off to the attorneys who hired me and went to bed.

Minutes later, or so it seemed, I was in the office again, firing up the old computer.

I've mentioned before that my office computer is old. If it were a Greek citizen it would almost qualify for a government pension in that country. In real time, not in dog years.

Which is not to say that my computer is a dog. No, my computer is a fine, trustworthy friend and ally (it reads everything I type, you know) and I would never say disparaging things about it. In fact, Friday, before I left, I gave it and the peripherals the long weekend off. I shut everything down. A Memorial Day present to Mother Earth and to my machines.

But, this morning, on the drop-dead-absolutely-final-don't-even-think-about-asking-for-more-time deadline for filing my appellate brief, the computer

just

didn't

want

to

start.


The doggone, er, lovely machine did a very convincing imitation of a paperweight for an extraordinary amount of time. I got Solitaire open after about about 20 minutes. But I couldn't get online. I couldn't even re-boot in the nice, polite, normal way.

So I shut the darn thing off. I pushed the button.

That made the re-boot take forever as it ran through the blue screen of maybe-this-time-it's-the-big-one... but, as you can see, I got here.

Eventually.

After a solid 90 minutes.

Isn't it always the way this works with machines?