Only on rare occasions do I look forward to the dawn of a new Monday. However, I’m going to take the arrival of tomorrow morning as official closure on this week from hell that we just got done wrapping up. It was hell not only for me, but for essentially my entire family as well; partially for the same reasons, and partially for different reasons altogether. The end result for all involved, one way or another, was exhaustion. At least, I’m happy to say, this weekend got progressively better, finally ending on a high note.
It all begin at the beginning of last week, when I learned that my great uncle had passed away. I belong to a very small family, so the loss of even one of its members — particularly one as cherished as “Tex,” the only great uncle I ever had the opportunity to get to know — is always keenly felt. As hard to take as losing him was, the experience was nothing short of a nightmare for my mom, grandmother and the rest of Tex’s family, as his final days were a flurry of emergency medical response and hospital bureaucracy that put some of the worst aspects of the U.S. health care industry in the spotlight. In the end, though, the family can at least rest assured that Tex is now at peace, and no longer suffering the mind-robbing effects of Alzheimer’s Disease as he had been for the last several years.
I’m the only child of two only children, so that should tell you all you need to know about just how small my family is. Not having any actual aunts or uncles, it was my mom’s uncle Tex who filled that role for me, and we always had a great time together. As early as the mid-1980s, he and I would go out shopping at the record store and have lunch together at one of my favorite restaurants, where we would talk and laugh and snark about countless things — like that time at Bill Knapps in 1987 when the “Happy Birthday” song got stuck on an endless loop, and we giggled about it for the rest of the afternoon.
Visiting the video arcade at the former Wonderland Mall was another of my favorite “Uncle Tex” activities, and for my birthday one year, he gave me a suede leather pouch filled with quarters. I still have it. Although most of the quarters have been spent, I saved a few of the originals, whose dates indicate they were minted in the early ’80s.
Into the 1990s, I became enchanted with Tex’s stories of World War II, particularly the Battle of the Bulge and all the other lore he used to tell me about. Sometimes he would tell stories I’d heard before — like the tale of the briefcase-bomb assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler, since chronicled in the film Valkyrie — but I always listened with rapt attention, because they were always just as good the second or third time around. When my wife and I recently started watching the Band of Brothers miniseries on HBO, I found myself telling her further details about some of E Company’s actions — especially the tale of General McAuliffe’s famous “Nuts!” reply to the German call for his surrender, one of Tex’s favorite war stories. My wife finally asked me how I knew so much of this stuff, and I had to stop myself and realize that it was all because of my Uncle Tex, and the further reading that he inspired me to do on my own.
Like every member of my small family, Tex was an incredibly generous and caring person, someone whom you knew always had your back. It’s a different world now — almost every last one of the places we went or things we did no longer exist to be enjoyed by future generations — but I count myself extraordinarily lucky to have had the times with him that I did. Although they are times that won’t be repeated, neither will they be forgotten.
So, as you might imagine, that was a particularly trying way to begin the week. And indeed, I found myself moving through life as though submerged in a vat of tar, making mere minutes of progress for each hour that inexplicably passed. It didn’t help that I was engaged in two simultaneous side projects, and that the level of work at my main job had stepped up several notches while we execute a big push toward a substantial product upgrade slated for early July. Not only that, but my annual job performance review was coming up on Friday, and while I didn’t feel like I had any cause for alarm or trepidation, in today’s economy, you always wonder what you’re going to hear from your boss.
Not helping matters at all was the shitstorm that cascaded down upon me during breakfast on Wednesday morning, which was when I performed my first email check of the morning and found one of my sidework clients up in arms about a misconfiguration with their web domain. Apparently we’d gotten some wires crossed, and I thought the client had given me a brand new domain to use for their new website, when in fact they had given me a domain that was currently in use for one of their other sites. On Tuesday night I had transferred the domain over to a new server, thinking no one was yet aware of the domain’s existence, and on Wednesday awoke to find a catastrophe well underway when no one was able to connect to the client’s old site anymore.
We got everything ironed out, but it took me until lunch time: straightening out the domain, erecting failsafes to catch visitors for whom the changes had not yet propagated, and calming myself down. But the damage to my mental state was already done, and I spent the rest of the day moving even slower than before, as though I were a marathon runner who had blown all of his energy in a solid ten minute super-sprint right out of the gate.
Friday was better, because my annual review came out quite favorably, and I even received a small raise. It was only $1 per hour, but anything is a gift in this economy, and one which I accepted quite gratefully. Besides, it’s not like I don’t understand. The company I work for is about as small as my family is, and they need to keep fixed costs down. I’d prefer that the company play it safe, rather than dole out generous raises and then abruptly go bankrupt.
Unfortunately, more stress came my way on Friday evening, when I had some personal issues to work through that made it difficult to enjoy what little success I’d enjoyed that week. And on Saturday morning, my client’s web domain blew up again, this time thanks to some advice I’d taken from their tech support folks which absolutely did not pan out at all. Again, I got it sorted out — and relatively quickly — but by this time, enough stress had accumulated to the point where I was ready to hurl myself off the nearest cliff.
The rest of Saturday was interesting, to say the least. Whereas the day had begun in the pits, it finished in the clouds. Some of you may know that my wife and I have been trying to have a child for a couple of years now, with no success. Since empirical evidence shows that the medical “fault” is mostly mine, on Saturday we decided to take the plunge and start acupuncture treatments. My wife has recently done a lot of research into the ancient Chinese art of acupuncture, and she’s convinced that it can help. The testimonials — some from personal friends and family members — seem to speak for themselves, and I’m all for trying promising solutions, so on a whim, we went to a local acupuncture doctor right here in town.
I had my first treatment at the doctor’s office right then and there. While it was certainly unlike any medical treatment I’ve ever had before, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience. You barely feel the needles; it’s not even close to the sensation of getting an injection, for instance. And the sessions are 20 minutes long; certainly more than manageable. The doctor’s office itself is a nice, quiet little place in a nice part of town, there are no dreary hours spent in a waiting room, and soothing Chinese music plays while you’re in session. It’s actually a very good way to relax and enjoy a few minutes of quiet time in the middle of the otherwise busy workday. And while it’s not exactly a soothing massage, it’s a damn sight preferable to any form of Western medical treatment I’ve ever had. I’ve got my next session on Tuesday, and I’m actually looking forward to it.
After the session, while we headed back home so that I could once again plunge myself headfirst into the hell known as work, I started to become stressed-out again just thinking about what lay ahead. It’s here that I have to thank my wife Apple for being a calming influence, and for convincing me to take a step back and put down the tools of my labor for a day. Since I had been happy to cooperate with her ideas and try acupuncture — on the spur of the moment, even though I was work-laden — she suggested that I do something nice for myself too. Something nice like visit the Apple store, to pick up that shiny new iPhone 3G S that I’ve been wanting for the better part of the year (way before we even knew what the phone was going to be called).
I could hardly argue. But since the 3G S had only just been released on Friday, the day before, I highly doubted there were any stores left in town that still had any stock. Much to my surprise, however, the very first Apple store I called had plenty of all configurations. Needless to say, we got in the freshly-washed GTO (hey, might as well drive the fun car on the way to pick up the fun toy) and headed down there, where I picked out a black 32GB iPhone 3G S, a dock and some crystal film screen protectors. Although some 3G S buyers have reported activation delays, mine activated in literally 30 seconds, and my old phone dropped off the network by the time we’d left the store. It was an utterly seamless transition.
We then spent the rest of the day at home, relaxing, playing with our toys (my wife Apple, after all, was now the proud recipient of my original EDGE iPhone), and doing absolutely no work. Just those few hours of relaxation — combined with a very good sleep that night — were enough to re-energize me in a major way. So much so that today I managed to make a lot of headway on a sidework project, and then go out to dinner with Apple at Carrabba’s, one of our favorite places. Given how badly this weekend started, I would have never guessed that it would end so pleasantly.
And the iPhone? It’s an absolute treat. I’ve got no issues with build quality, performance or service. And it’s like a quantum leap forward from my old EDGE phone. The all-new Cortex A8 processor and 256 MB of RAM ensure that every single application opens in a split second, and the user interface never jitters, stutters or hangs. You can open half a dozen web pages on different tabs in Safari, switch between them and never have a single one force-reload like the old iPhone always did. And, I’m happy to report, AT&T’s 3G network here in southwest Florida is awesome. I get full bars in my room — a place where my old phone sometimes struggled to acquire signal — and my speed tests on the 3G network have shown averages of 1600 kbps down and 235 kbps up, which is pretty good for the “Death Star” (as AT&T is sometimes called). Plus, the new video recording and onboard editing features are phenomenal. I think I’m going to have a good time with this little device.
Apple, for her part, is just as geeked about inheriting my “hand-me-down” technology. She’s decided, I think, that she won’t reactivate my old iPhone as a second line on my AT&T account. Rather, she likes the flexibility of her TracFone’s pay-as-you-go plan. In Thailand — her neck of the woods — all phones are like that, and she vastly prefers prepaid plans. So, it looks like she’ll simply use the EDGE iPhone as a glorified iPod, pocket computer, organizer and everything else it can do. That’s fine by me, given that it will save us some $40 additional dollars each month. (Although any time she changes her mind and decides she wants to activate the old phone, she’s more than welcome.)
So that’s the tale of my insane week. I didn’t want to call it a week from hell, because although it had more than its fair share of low points, it taught me a good lesson about how I should manage and approach my work — and that lesson, when put into practice, put me in a much better place. I’m going to begin this coming week by arranging all of my tasks in such a way that I complete them all without giving myself a coronary in the process, and at the same time, I’m going to finally make some headway on a few neglected personal projects, like the restoration of our ‘79 Trans Am and continuing the story I started working on earlier this year.
With any luck, it’ll be a much better week than the last.
If Uncle Tex had been around, he would have loved going shopping for that new gadget with you, and would have been only too happy to “put it on the plastic.” In his day, he was a great one for getting the latest in electronic toys. He had the first tape recorder I ever saw, the first Polaroid camera, the first color tv in the neighborhood, and the first video camera too.
He was a good man. No doubt about it.
I hope your week continues to go well.