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bed head housecalls Wednesday, January 28 2004
It snowed maybe six inches during the night, but by the time I ran my housecalls all the roads had been plowed, even the switchbacks of Ohayo Mountain Road.
Happily, I've been finding myself feeling increasingly professional these days. Even in the recent past, I've felt at times like a poser, particularly when I didn't immediately know what course of action to take with somebody's messed up computer. Now, though, I often surprise myself with how good I am. Today, for example, I set up three housecalls in a row and managed to get to all of them on time (well, I was actually ten minutes early to the second and fifteen minutes early to the third). Two of those housecalls went on for hours, an experience that in the past would have implied I had been poorly prepared and worked inefficiently, an implication that always depresses me. Today, though, I felt as though I'd left all my customers much happier than I'd found them. The last one was actually a volunteer at the Catskill Animal Sanctuary. She'd never seen Gretchen there, but she was among the very few people in the world who had seen the Catskill Animal Sanctuary website I'd put together. She was a metal sculptor who listened to NPR, so she was communicating on my wavelength, more or less. Thus she might not have thought I was a complete weirdo, even with my terrible case of bed head. I'd gone to sleep last night after taking a bath and then not washing my hair, and it was sticking out in all directions. You could have hidden an aardvark in there. Aardvark means "earth pig" in Afrikaans.
"Aardvark" happens to be the name I've given to the Windows NT 4.0 computer down in Gretchen's study. Other computers in the house include Opossum (Mandrake Linux), Woodchuck (Windows 2000), Bat (Vaio laptop running Windows XP), Hedgehog (Windows NT 4.0), Muskrat (hardware test machine running Windows 98), Vole (guest room computer running Windows XP), and Cottontail (iMac running OS 9).
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