Our community has an emergency operations planning committee, of which I am a member. I don’t know how I ended up on an emergency operations committee. Anyone who reads this blog should know that I’m the least qualified person to handle an emergency, unless “handling” is synonymous with “panicking and breathing into a paper bag.” But there I am. They’ll realize their mistake at some point, but then it will be too late.
Anyway, we were discussing the upcoming Annual Meeting and Board of Trustees election. Did I mention that I’m also a candidate for the Board of Trustees? I know. I have no idea how this happened, either. I’ll have an entirely separate post about that topic. Mark your calendars.
So anyway, we’re on this interminable Zoom call, discussing the contingency plan for the annual meeting, and all of a sudden, I was literally dying from heat, like 104-degree fever heat. Ironic, I thought. We’re discussing COVID-19 emergency workarounds, and now I myself have the ‘rona.
Actually, what I have is a super-helpful Nest thermostat, which thinks with its little Google-powered brain that what we really want is not to be cool in the summer, but to save as much energy as possible, which is why it will adjust the indoor temperature to 88 degrees the second you turn your back on it. A thermostat set at 88 in August and an hour and a half with a computer on my lap and I felt like I had Ebola. I got off the call, turned off the computer, turned down the temperature, and was miraculously restored to health.
*****
I worked today, because it’s Thursday, and everybody works on Thursday. I am part of a pilot test group for a new software application, and I found the testing process harder to understand than usual. Normally, I just follow the instructions, and I get the expected results (or I don’t, but not because of user error) and I submit my completed test script, and that’s the end of it.
This application is less straightforward than others that I have tested, and the engineers created a video to go along with the instructions and test script. Even with the video, though, I struggled a bit to follow the steps. I had to keep stopping the video and switching back to the application to see what step I missed, because I kept missing steps. Finally, I finished testing, submitted the results, and crossed “pilot test” off my list of things to do. But I didn’t feel the normal list-crossing-off satisfaction. The whole job had been such a mental struggle that I wasn’t confident that I’d done everything correctly; and if the job isn’t done correctly, it isn’t done at all, and then where do I get off crossing it off a list? That is a clear and distinct violation of the to-do list EULA. (Look it up).
Not only that, but this was the second time in as many days that I had a hard time following directions. I do not now, or ever, claim to be the proverbial sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can usually follow simple written instructions without any difficulty. So not only am I a viral plague vector, but I’m also suffering from early dementia. Or just dementia, because I’m almost 55 and it’s not too early for me to suffer the infirmities of old age.
*****
It’s Friday now. I don’t have coronavirus, and I got things done today. I’m pretty sharp, cognitively speaking. And you know what else? I’m not going blind, either. I finally replaced my Fitbit, when the charger broke. The screen on the old one had gotten very dim; and being me, I naturally thought that my eyesight was failing. So in just a few short days, I recovered from coronavirus, reversed a decline into dementia, and regained my sight. One miracle after another.
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