I used to have an assistant who was useless. No, she was beyond useless, and a back-stabbing idiot. She would constantly come to me to complain about her computer: “It doesn’t want to do exwhyzee,” she would whine. “I told it to do exwhyzee and it won’t, it insists on doing efgeeaitch.”

I would suck in air, count to thirty in a language I don’t speak, and tell her, “No. Your computer is not a sentient being. It neither wants nor does not want to do anything. It can only do what you tell it to do, so the mistake must be a user error. Show me exactly what you tried.”

And then she would, and I would point out that she had/hadn’t held down a specific key, or had her caps lock on, or she had typed a word backwards, or some other stupid mistake and she’d glare at me and talk trash behind my back. But that’s not why I bring her up. No, I am reminded of her today because all mechanical things around me are breaking down.

She was a real whiz at astrology (of course) and she would have said that Mercury went retrograde, or Uranus was in my house of blahblahblah.

But the fact is, I got the lap top back on Monday, and by Saturday it was turning itself off, again. So now, the lap top in on its way to Cupertino, and I’m freaking out. I’m also down $500 dollars, because repairs are a minimum of $300 and I had to buy an external hard drive to back up everything before I sent the machine away.

This morning I woke up to a white koi pond. White with coral and calcium silt, and my pond pump is screwed, and I am sitting at home waiting for the pump guys to come and a) take the old pump away and b) sell me a new one and c) install the new one so that I can flush the pond and make sure that my five 25-pound koi are not dead on the bottom, since I can’t see through the water to check. Nobody seems to be floating belly up, so we’re good so far.

But I’m sitting at home, not at my work desk, and the boss is back from two weeks on the road and he’s pissed that I’m not there today. Not to mention that I missed something while he was gone that I was supposed to be on top of and wasn’t.

Crap.