Ceasing To Be

There was a short period of mourning yesterday morning, as my computer decided to die for no apparent reason while I was typing in a beautifully crafted e-mail. Thinking it was just a power cut of some kind, I pressed the power button to fire the machine back up.

Nothing happened. Again. Nothing happened.

Now I was annoyed. My computer - bust. No more glorious posts to my blog. And no way of fixing it. I could order some parts over the internet, but I can't get them delivered to this house because I'm never here. Besides, I couldn't face not having a computer for almost a week while the stuff got here.

So there was no choice: I had to rely on the high street, something I haven't done in years. I avoid shopping on high streets for a number of reasons, the first on the list being just how much I hate going from one shop to the next to browse. It's so easy just to buy the first thing you find, yet you know you will only find something a few days later at half the price on the internet.

I decided that the power supply must have been to blame. I was 70% sure. £20 later, my computer is back to its old self again. And all fixed within 8 hours. Pretty impressive, I thought. I was preparing for a long time without it, and having to watch the bores of TV again.

This trip to the high street gave me an excellent excuse to leave work early, not that anyone is counting. This gave me a great opportunity to avoid all the disasters that were happening in work yesterday. My MP was in a foul mood, and the atmosphere was spreading to the rest of us. He deliberately avoided the office so he didn't have to do work. Now we have a huge backlog on our hands, and it only makes things worse for him in the long run.

So I took as many opportunities to escape as I could. The usual lunch hour was extended to lunch-hour-and-ten-minutes. Then I, quite conveniently as it happens, had a pre-booked appointment to go and give blood. This turned to a disaster when they couldn't find me on the system, as they still don't have a national database of all donors. Pathetic. So I had to register again as a new donor, and so go through all the boring questions about have I ever injected bodybuilding drugs again. Does it look like I've ever injected bodybuilding drugs?

Then things got worse. Mid flow, my vein decided that it didn't want to give any more. Half a bag full, and no more blood would come out. The consequence was that the nurse had to move the needle around - at some pain - to try to get the flow going again. Nope. Nothing more would come out. So I had to abandon mid-donation. Hopefully they still use the blood for something, but, as I'm sure you can understand, it is quite damaging to one's male ego that I couldn't deliver the goods. The feelings of inadequacy were soon eased by the free biscuits.

The recurring theme today: well, the usual sillyness of my life is normal, but today it is combined with the death of my computer, and the apparent death of myself. Whoever heard of someone stopping bleeding when they have a big hole in their arm and a needle sticking in it?