Heart-Lung Transplant on Goose Creek
...or, Metaphors Be With You
Yesterday, for 12 long hours, two of my vital systems were shut down. First the plug was pulled on my nervous system and it was disassembled, it's divers wirey viscera scattered and piled in odd corners of the surgical field (the front room.) Then all storage and retrieval systems, all spatial orientation to life as we know it was piece by piece dissected from the organic whole of me (or whole mess, wife would say) and I suffered from expressive and receptive aphasia (could neither speak or receive communications) and for long hours was disoriented to place and person. Who was I now that both my desk and my computer were in this terrible state of metamorphosis? Would I survive this multi-system surgery?
Okay. I could milk this little metaphor of home improvement for several more medically-tilted paragraphs, but I have oodles of stuff to do before I go to Radford today and get my ship in order for the semester that starts on Monday. The truth of the matter is (and it WAS immensely disruptive) my new white oak desk was delivered yesterday, the old particle board Constant in Life sits on the back porch, bound for the dump. I paid $10 for it 10 years ago, and think I pretty well got my money's worth out of it. Good bye, old friend. And while it may have seemed a study in chaos, there was an order to the mess, and it was a known structure in the unknown universe. But it all had to go.
Just the desk replacement alone would have been a major undertaking. But the computer system that sat on the desk had to come totally apart. And with the massive desk then in place, and even though we designed cutouts in the right places for access to the back of the computer, getting the job done yesterday was something I can see I'll have to hire a teenager to do in a few years. I literally had to crawl into the bottom of the computer console with a flashlight maybe 15 times to get it done.
But I have come out from under anesthesia. The nervous system is working well enough after some initial glitches. But now I have reinhabit my desk-space, learn a new scheme of things in drawer-space so I can lay my hand reflexively on the stapler; find envelopes; grab a blank CD; and locate that stack of unpaid bills before it is too late.
Well I can see I'm not getting any sympathy from you folk. But I'm telling you, this was as close to a heart-lung transplant as I ever want to come. And yet, I've lived through it; I'm blogging again. And I found that stack of bills. I really need to go back to work.
Soon, pictures of my new Bridge from which Jean-Luc navigates the Starship Fragments. No wait. That's mixing metaphors, isn't it?
Comments
You can mix your metaphors anytime, Fred, since you do it so well! Congratulations on the new work station. Sounds lovely.
Posted by: kenju | August 17, 2005 7:25 AM
Workstation? In the country? Doesn't compute. A barefoot Fred, on the porch, feet perched on bannister, laptop in lap. That's the image that comes to mind.
Good luck with the new workstation Jean Luc. May the force be with you (now that's mixing metaphors).
Posted by: Doug Thompson | August 17, 2005 9:19 AM
I soooooooo understand. My 'friends' (HA!) think that helping them set up THEIR new computer is FUN for ME!! HA!!! It seems I'm the only one in their world smart or stupid enough to understand how to do it. It sucks.
And there is always a point where they look at me and say, "I thought you would have fun with this Kim," as I flip thru BOXES of old software, trying to get THEIR brains back on-line.
"Did you write down the password?" I ask. "What password?" they say. And so it goes. AAHHHUUGGGHHHHHHHH
Posted by: Kim | August 17, 2005 1:15 PM