Monday, August 6, 2001

 

12:00 a.m. I've been away from my desk for long stretches these last few weeks, and that can be dangerous. Here's a perfect case in point ...

I have a nice newish modern somewhat plastic lamp over my desk and it has a magnifying glass built in. Very useful for many tasks; critical for splinter removal. You turn on the light, pull the lens over the affected area, notice that magnified skin hardly looks like skin at all, and jab around with whatever needle is handy.

It's always been thus. It's how a mother becomes a hero to many.

You'll notice that there's a tiny square of white on the circular flap above the glass on the lamp. Also -- look at how bright and imposing my row of office windows appears in the distorted, magnified moment captured in this photo. They're newly washed, in honor of the impending sale.

They used to be covered with a thin brown gauzy fabric to cut down on the screen glare and to allow me to work at the computer no matter how bright the sun, how long the day. My office was cool and comfortable and felt a little submerged.

Now, it's bright as a new penny. I hope.

Who heeds the warnings? The little sticker says: "Replace plastic cover over glass when lamp is not in use." I'd assumed -- and who wouldn't? -- that the sticker was fussing about how easily the glass could get scratched, or maybe dusty. Who cared?

Just to be contrary, I left the lid up. I don't like being ordered around, especially by plastic.

And, as I said, I've not been in my office very much these days, except to wash windows and to remove the inevitable splinter, so you can imagine my surprise when I came in the other day and caught the printer actually smoking. A tiny little puff, and in a few more hours, give or take, the thing would actually have caught on fire.

Lucky for me the lens was aimed where it was. A few inches to the right and the dictionary could have started a conflagration; a few inches higher and the LEDs would have melted like jujubes on a Chevy dashboard in the middle of the Badlands.

So now I have a nasty scorch on an otherwise lovely, faithful, hardworking printer, and coincidentally, a sticker that's the perfect size and shape to cover the damage.

It seems as if I've been away from the desk for years, not weeks. The system is still not settled, but I'm going along as if it never crashed and never will again. I've begun refilling the hard drive that I had to erase, pretending I don't really miss my perfect font collection -- but I do.

You really should back up all your files, and you should double-back the ones you'd miss the most, should the machines ever fail. Follow directions carefully. Color within the lines. Close cover before striking.

Oh, and unplug the sander before you try to change the paper padlets.

Trust me.