Too Much Sun

If one is a bit obsessive, and I am, there are so many opportunities to avoid the trap.

However, I rarely avoid. I usually take the bait and get my ankle in the steel bear claw.

Apparently, there is a little bit of computer patching, especially for handheld devices, that needs to be done for this earlier-in-the-year than usual Daylight Savings time. I am not a fan of Daylight Savings. I know most people love it. But for someone who already goes to bed very late, this just makes matters worse.

In my desire to dispel some anxiety over my distaste for the government messing with my clocks, I attempted to take some control over this loathsome tradition. I figured I would go ahead and make the patch for my Cingular HTC 8125 pocket PC cell phone. When I got to the web site that Cingular directed me to, sent to me by text message this morning, the site said, “But before you do this patch, make sure you update your ActiveSync to the latest version.” ActiveSync, for those who don’t know, is the software that synchronizes the phone data with Outlook on the computer when they are joined together in USB matrimony.

I did it. I downloaded the new version.
And then I lost three hours of my life.

The joys of sync software are none. Of course, the new software had to set up a new linking between the computer and the handheld and there was still the old linking. And the new software needed me to delete the old for all this to work. And then after that, there were other problems. The sound note I made of the bells ringing from Notre Dame when I was in Paris---it somehow became corrupted and kept causing a sync error. This error was no big deal—however, I would have had to live with the error remarks for the rest of my synching days and I couldn’t have that.

And there was a sharing protocol that wouldn’t let me delete Quasimodo’s bells.

I kept tweaking around. Finally, after much resetting and turning things on and off, I was able to delete the bells and the error message went away.

All this- and I still never got the daylight savings patch.

What a waste of time. Of course, it was the perfect way to avoid writing. But then, I was so annoyed by Microsoft and so annoyed by my own nature to need things perfect that I focused like a dog and finished the first draft of a major television thing I am writing and then went to my friend’s house and we finished the first half of a first draft of our zombie movie. I was obsessive. But I bounced off the obsession into the original plan for the day. The only thing I missed was going to the gym. But isn’t that obsession, anyway?

Beware the patches. Beware computers in general. Beware obsession.

Daylight Savings is not for me.