Dopp Juice Archive

You may have noticed that my last post was about having a full plate. You may have also noticed that my last post was nearly three weeks ago. These are not coincidental. They are quite related.

But while I have a few free moments on “Indigenous People’s Day” (or “Columbus Day,” if you live in a less rebelliously liberal part of the United States), I’d like to give a quick summary of my recent technodrama and its unexpected happy endings.

First, Gmail. I posted awhile ago about getting locked out of my gmail account. Fortunately, I received some very valuable feedback from a reader who has now become a very valuable friend to me (yay for broken tools creating new connections!) and was creatively persistent with Google. Forty-two days after the incident, I finally received an apology from them, along with instructions on how to now access to my account. My Gmail account is alive again! The irony is that I had forty days and forty nights to completely detach from it and pronounce it dead. It feels sort of like a zombie now. (A zombie that wants to eat my brains.)

Second, the Treo. Have I told you about the physical health of my beloved Palm-driven cell phone? Let me put it this way: every single person on my web development team has been threatening for more than six months now to steal it from me and destroy it so I will be forced to get a new one.

More specifically, the antennae is held on by a paperclip. That paperclip is held on by green electrical tape. The earpiece has broken off. The holder for the stylus is so loosened that I’ve now lost three of them and have given up on carrying one. The front face plate has separated from the back of the machine and is being held on by a single loose screw (and the paperclipped antennae, when it happens to be attached). The RAM is so overloaded that it takes 5-10 seconds to load the dialing screen when I’m ready to make a phone call.

BUT IT WORKS FINE! I DON’T SEE WHAT ALL THE FUSS IS ABOUT!

The laughable part is that I’m paying for full insurance on the machine (which is all of $6 a month), and I could have claimed it for repairs or replacement a long time ago, given its condition… even without my coworkers first stealing it from me and throwing it into the bay.

The camel’s back broke yesterday, though, when I dropped the machine on the pavement and cracked the front face plate. Now it took four fingers clutching the machine from three different sides to hold its pieces together well enough to get a signal. It still worked — no, really, IT STILL WORKED! — but okay, yeah, it was probably time to take advantage of the insurance.

This morning, I did a final hot-sync with my computer to back up the data… which turned out to be quite an undertaking because the hot-sync port is mostly broken, too. The task required propping the machine halfway up on the edge of a notebook and weighting down the cradle port with a pair of heavy metal scissors, stepping back, and holding my breath for ten minutes, praying that the precarious sculpture wouldn’t move before the sync was complete. It took a few tries to get it right.

Then I walked into the Sprint Repair Center at 4th and Folsom, slapped my busted Treo down on the counter, and announced, “My Treo is exploding in on itself and eating its own brain. I have insurance. What are my options?” The man ran some diagnostics (which amounted to dismantling the tape and paper clip and watching it fall apart in his hands like some kind of gag gift), and returned with a concerned look on his face.

“We can’t repair this for you,” he said apologetically.

“Oh,” I said with disappointment. “But I have insurance…”

He interrupted me. “We’ll have to replace it for you.”

“I am TOTALLY OKAY with you replacing it for me,” I reassured him. “COMPLETELY FINE WITH IT. But, um, how long will it take? Do I need to go without a phone for a few days?”

He pulled out a new Treo and handed it to me. It was already connected to my phone number. “Here you go,” he said.

“That’s it? I don’t need to sign anything? Or pay a deductible?”

“Nope. That’s it. If you’d like, you can wait ten minutes and I’ll transfer your contacts.”

“No, that’s fine, I have it synced on my computer,” I said.

And I ran home gleefully, laughing and skipping in puddles and dreaming about all the beautiful ways this new phone will fall apart on me over the next year.

Ah, beginnings!

I just made a very hard decision. The fact that I sat on it for four days tells me it was hard. The fact that I made the decision at all tells me I’m getting smarter. Here’s what it was:

A very talented graphic designer asked me if I would trade services with her (she’ll redesign my website if I’ll make hers functional). I spent a week saying “ooh! neat! yay! probably… maybe…” And then, finally, I got honest with both of us and said “no.”

And I’m still wincing, still recoiling in self-disgust that I just turned down the opportunity to have my website redesigned by one of the most talented designers I know for free.

But it wouldn’t be free. It would cost several weeks of hard work on top of an already full tech industry workload and a professional writing course. It would cost sleep, it would cost the last remnants of my social life, it would cost a few notches of my health, and because of all these things, it would also probably cost the quality of the project, and therefore, my integrity as a professional, and maybe even my relationship with this designer. I’m not trying to be dramatic here — this is just the truth of a full plate.

And it’s kind of baffling, how much delusion can set in what such a beautiful carrot as a website makeover is dangled in front of my face. All of a sudden, I become Super Sarah! And Super Sarah doesn’t need sleep or a social life or food or balance, because Super Sarah can do anything if it’s worth it to her. Because a plate is never really full — more can always be heaped on if she’s really hungry, or if it’s really tasty. And what does it matter how awful she’ll feel before it’s done? The point is it tastes good! Ha!

That was my M.O. for a long time, and I grew considerably from it. My reckless acceptance of responsibility took me places I never dreamed, far faster than I ever should have traveled. And it got me into trouble. Too often, I had to choose between honoring my responsibilities and taking care of myself. And too often, I chose to honor my responsibilities. And then I learned the lesson: When you stop taking care of yourself, you stop being able to honor your responsibilities.

These days, doing a good job is more important to me than doing a lot of jobs. For months, I’ve been turning down new paying clients and referring them elsewhere, so what made me think I could take on a trade? A full plate is a full plate is a full plate, and I have responsibilities to honor. I chose those responsibilities carefully.

That makes them worth it.

One quiet Sunday afternoon just a few weeks ago, in a bizarre display of things-that-are-not-surprising-in-San-Francisco, groups of people on trains all over the city spontaneously burst into Christmas carols. It was August.

It was supposed to be about happy jolly fun. Then it turned into a political act about free speech. And then it turned back into happy jolly fun.

The story is covered at the SF Shenanigans blog.

And I’m only sharing this because it’s interesting. I had nothing to do with it. I swear. That isn’t me in those pictures. Really. I’m a good upstanding citizen who doesn’t create anachronistic merrymaking chaos.

Seriously.

Stop looking at me like that.

You believe me, don’t you?