Internet Down

I am often overwhelmed at the emails in my inbox. Most of them are junk and by the time I delete all that are, I have no time to deal with the real ones. I don’t know about others, but I find staring at a screen for a long time makes me feel antsy. I thought it might be the angle of my computer screen, but I feel the same when using my Ipad.

So late last night when in the middle of replying to some very nice fan mail the Internet started acting up, you’d think I’d be glad to have an excuse to ditch staring at my computer screen and go to bed. But instead I started to freak out, remembering that I hadn’t responded to my editor yet. She’d sent me the copy edit of WOUND UP IN MURDER earlier in the day and given me a deadline a little over a week a way. I’m usually able to deliver on the date she asks for, but I am just finishing up doing our corporate taxes and next week we have two seminars. I have to print up all the materials, stuff folders, greets the attendees and set up appointments. In short, it is a busy time.

I realized I was going to need a few days and I wanted to let her know as soon as possible. Since I couldn’t send mail on my computer, I thought of sending it on my smartphone. Only it had sat in my purse all day instead of being plugged in and was now so dead that even when I plugged it in, it wouldn’t go on.

I made a last ditch try at sending an email on my computer. But the Internet was still down. There was nothing to do but go to bed and hope it would all be well in the morning.

But it wasn’t. The Internet was back up, but my email program was acting weird and I couldn’t tell if my email to my editor went through. I frantically kept trying to get my email program to work, but my computer resisted and when I tried my Ipad, it kept telling me I had the wrong password (it wasn’t).

I finally just gave it all some time and eventually everything worked again. It turned out the email did go through and my editor sent an answer granting me the extra days.

All that fussing about drowning in emails and yet when the Internet was down and email program inaccessible, I felt helpless, vulnerable and abandoned. I certainly wasn’t thinking straight. All I would have had to do was pick up the phone this morning and reach her the old fashioned way - on my kitchen phone.