Electronic Devices Hate Me
You know what is totally awesome? Having an shrill, piercing alarm going off for no fewer than SIX HOURS while you are trying to work. Especially on the day you have a really, really important grant application due. Like really important. Like one that funds not only your own salary (meaning if we don’t get the grant, I don’t have a job), but also the salaries of 20 other people.
The alarm was already going off intermittently when I arrived at work at 8 a.m. Monday and when security showed up around noon to try to fix it, they managed to make it so that instead of going off intermittently, the alarm was going off non-stop. And then told us “you should call maintenance.” After *two hours* of nonstop high-pitched alarm, maintenance *finally* showed up to fix it. By which time, of course, I was already finished with said grant application.
Now, I have to say that this isn’t the only machinery-related anomaly in my life of late. Machines have been effing up around me all the time lately and I’m starting to wonder if it’s something about me. Perhaps that freak lab incident where I got bitten by a radioactive, genetically engineered lab rat means I am now giving off electricity-disrupting gamma rays that interfere with electronic devices.
In addition to the rogue alarm that just wouldn’t shut up, I’ve also had to deal with:
- my laptop deciding that it doesn’t want to keep proper time, losing anywhere from a few minutes to almost an hour on some days (while it’s totally fine on other days).
- waking up the other day to find that my watch was, completely inexplicably, behind by 1 hr, but also ahead by 1 day. It said it was April 1 at 5 a.m. when, in fact, it was March 31 at 6 a.m. I know I’d reset my watch to Pacific time when I returned from Yellowknife (otherwise I would have been an hour late for my class on Friday), so I know it wasn’t that. And it’s not like it could have gotten the date mixed up and tried to do Daylight Saving Time, as then it would have sprung forward, not back.
- msn messenger decided to log itself in several times during my lecture last week. Yes, during my lecture, which I was presenting to 94 university students, my msn kept popping up on the screen over top of my PowerPoint slides, despite the fact that I had logged it off and the “log in automatically” box was not checked (trust me, I have 94 witnesses that can verify that).
I’m pretty sure that electronic devices just hate me.
Comments |0|
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.