First Day Jitters

Remember the cliched middle school nightmare of not being able to get your locker open and being late for class? Or of being in the middle of showering after gym and the fire drill alarm goes off?

Yeah, it was almost that bad.

They issued us these lovely MacBooks (laptop computers by Apple) loaded with all kinds of software and I took it with me to the first session, planning to use it to take notes. That's one thing I learned during my internship this last three weeks. I may never take manual notes again unless....unless what happened this morning happens again.

So I take my MacBook with me. And I open it up and start it and it kind of sits there while we're going over stuff. Nothing I really needed to take notes on for the first hour or so. So I put it in sleep mode to save the battery because there are no plugs on these tables--which I had thought a bit odd because this is a really high-tech room designed for all kinds of presentations. But I'm not worried because, after all, my Dell will run a couple of hours or more on the battery and this one shouldn't be that much different.

Except that I'm noticing the battery indicator seems to be showing less than a full charge. I'm thinking, "OK, during the break I'll slip back and pick up my old-fashioned college-ruled paper notebook just in case." Except there wasn't really a break.

And then we get to a point where I really do need to take notes, so I wake up Mac and try to open Word and the little W at the bottom of the screen just keeps bouncing up and down, but it won't actually do anything. Neither will my cursor do anything because it seems the computer is frozen. So I gratefully--humbly--accept an offer of paper from a fellow Fellow (nothing like showing up really prepared on the first day, is there?) and turn my Mac off and make the best of it.

Learned afterward that the plugs are in the floor. I hadn't thought to look there.

Two tech calls later that afternoon, I've got my printer on the right network and printing and I'm thinking this is a really impressive start to the year. Yikes!

However, I'm using Mac to deliver this m'log/blog, so we're at least on speaking terms this evening.

Speaking of m'log/blog, you have something like 11 more days to vote on whether it should be a m'log or a blog. To vote properly, you should go to my blog site at justthewritetouch.blogspot.com and look for the survey on the right hand side. There's a picture there and I think the colors are nice. But I am accepting absentee ballots by email. If you've forgotten the debate, you can read my previous posting. That is one advantage to the blog format.

Next time, pictures!