Not my responsibility
I was tired last night. OK, sick and tired, but sometimes that amounts to the same thing. I got home last night (at about 6:00) to find that Kitten from Hell had found a bag full of little soy sauce packets left over from the Sunday’s take-out Chinese. She’d stolen it off the table, carried it to the middle of the floor, and must have started playing with it as if it were a toy mouse. When she bit it, the packets exploded into her mouth. I returned to find the bag of burst soy sauce packets weeping brown tears onto the carpet, and KfH making frequent stops at the water bowl and looking pathetic. She wasn’t even enthusiastic about dinner, although she did eat and keep it down. For some reason, the soy beaded up on the carpet and turned out to be a relatively easy clean up job (much easier than cat vomit is). I didn’t bother taking pictures. There were too many catastrophes yesterday, and I didn’t see the point of committing one more to film.
I finished figuring out how the numbers from my dividends statement were generated, finding a four cent error in one of the broker’s dividend figures in the process. I haven’t decided yet if I’m calling to tell him. Four cents isn’t going to make a hill of beans of difference on my taxes, but since the reports are computer generated, I suppose it could represent a computer glitch that could manufacture bigger errors on other people’s reports. My current inclination right now is to not bother. Let them sort it out if they have to.
When I finished up with that it was nine o’clock on the nose. I’d been drinking a beer, which I didn’t want, and dumped about three-quarters of it down the drain and went to bed to read for a while (Brin’s “Kiln People”, for any of you sci-fi fans out there, is turning into a very good read). I got through a few pages when I decided just to turn the light off and go to sleep. Which I did.
The Professor came in from his evening class about ten-thirty. He was astounded that he’d woken me up, and started in on the “what’s wrong” routine he’s so good at. I told him that the kitten had stolen the soy sauce, that I’d finally figured out how to derive the dividend information the federal forms wanted, and that I was pretty much done with the boards he administers. His immediate response was that he didn’t know what he was going to do about the message board to keep people posting if I left.
Great, just what I need. A guilt trip that the board is going to die and it will be all my fault. I told him that the board would get along fine without me. He actually let me go back to sleep at that point, I imagine so he could hit the forum himself and see what’s up.
When he finally came to bed at 2:00 it turned into another hour and a half conversation. He mentioned several times that he could never hold a grudge the way I do, and he figured that I’d get over it eventually. He was careful to say that he didn’t feel I was at fault, although the implication was that I was blowing it all out of proportion. Who knows, maybe I am. But it doesn’t feel like it right now.
What surprised me was his comment that “I guess this means we aren’t going to be meeting the Dutch Scotsman then.” Huh? Since when did we have plans to meet him? “Well, it was always a possibility,” was the reply. I made it clear that The Prof could meet with anyone he chose to, at any time he wanted, but no, I really have no pressing need to meet this guy face to face. I have to wonder what brought that up, though. Gods help me if they were making plans behind my back for some sort of surprise.
The soy sauce wasn’t my responsiblity. I’m not the one who saves those little packets so they can be thrown away a dozen at a time instead of one or two at a time. The error on the divident statement isn’t my responsibility. Let the broker figure it out. That’s what he skims off the top for. And The Professor’s forum is not my responsibility. If it fails simply because I no longer post to it, then The Professor wasn’t doing his part as an administrator to keep it active and interesting.
Yup. I have an attitude problem.