fast day

Working as a reference librarian, which I used to do, requires an ability to juggle a lot of unrelated activities in real time. It was like that at home yesterday.

I came back early afternoon from an outing with more data for the Potlatch restaurant guide to find B., who was off work that day, reporting that the DVR wasn't working. Playing around with it myself suggested that the problem was that the batteries in the remote were dead, but that turned out not to be it. I called up customer service and got stuck on the automated system's question, "Is this problem only on one TV?" We only have one TV, so either answer is misleading. When I got a human, we ran through various tests with no luck, so she got us a repair appointment for 4-8 pm.

The repair guy actually arrived early, and not only was I in the middle of adding the restaurant info to my database on my computer, a delicate matter of shuffling around info from a lot of scribbled notes, I was actually downstairs on the phone dealing with a call from my editor about upcoming review assignments when the doorbell rang, so I pointed the guy at the TV and finished the conversation, but I couldn't return to the computer, because there turned out to be a lot more to the repair. The guy had to check where the line came in and looked totally disgusted at the way the phone box had been wired up (and I flashed back to memories of the disagreeable time we had getting that work done, several years ago, and how much better everything was going this time), so he had to redo all of that, incidentally cutting off both internet and phone for a while, and then he got to look at the back of the TV set and resume his look of total disgust at how that had been wired up. So he installed a new cable and gave us a new remote, and I handed it over to B. who watches 90% of the television in the household and consequently is the far better person to ensure it's all working right.

This had lasted long enough that I also made and we ate dinner in the middle of all of it, and it was only after he left that I finally got to finish everything up with the restaurant and send an e-mail to the friend I'm attending this weekend's concert with to OK a change of plans from the phone call and then get that confirmation back to my editor, and feed Pippin who'd finally come out of the closet that he'd disappeared into when the doorbell rang. (Pandora, on the other hand, had had to be physically removed from nosing around in the vicinity of loose pieces of insulation she might try to eat.) So all around it was a very fast day.