While running a small print job as class parent, I was reminded of the difficulty I had with clerical tasks last fall while we were putting together the show Clown Axioms. Then as now, I made a special trip home in the middle of the day just to print something out and I had about 45 minutes in the apartment to accomplish the task. However, the e-mail attachment was in Microsoft word which slowed down my Mac so much that I couldn’t even open the file until it was too late and I had to leave to go pick up My Kid from school. By then I had also discovered that we didn’t have any printer paper and so after I picked up my kid we went to the office supply store, but it was closed, so we went to Target and by the time we got home there was half an hour to get some homework done before The Husband came home for dinner, and of course that was the time the homework was left at school and there were tears and there were time outs and dinner was delayed for hours. And then there was the humiliating reset of my laptop by The Husband because of something I did in the process of trying to get the Microsoft document to communicate with my Mac. Technology is not an endeavor in which I possess an abundance of natural gifts.
And so the next morning, in the rain, I went to Kinko’s where the the inattentive counter staff and inserting of credit cards into multiple machines, adding colored paper to the tray and waiting for the clerk to void a mistake made the whole thing take far longer than I ever would have guessed when I first read the e-mail about the form to copy and distribute. What ever can go wrong will go wrong.