In today’s episode…

In today’s episode we find our heroine sitting quietly at her desk, unable to string two sentences together for an upcoming promotional piece about her business. The problem, she realizes, is that she has written about it so many times in the past twenty years that everything she puts on paper today is stale, unamusing, trite, repetitive, and boring. She can think of nothing fresh to say.

It is good she has her own office, though she never closes the door. She carefully angles her laptop so that anyone entering can not see the screen. She is the only Mac user at her business, and no one there has any interest in learning the little secrets to operating one. Therefore, she has time to hide what she is working on with a quick switch to an open browser window, which makes her appear to be performing all important research. She still uses the Classic OS on a four year old machine because after all, who needs anything more if all one does is write, surf, and email? Right now, for instance, her co-worker standing in the doorway assumes because our heroine’s fingers are dancing across the keyboard that she is, indeed, actually working on the promotional piece.

She holds up one finger, the universal signal for wait one minute, finishes this sentence, and hits the application switcher. Ah yes, she has remembered to leave Google open with the appropriate research links. She invites her co-worker into her office. A problem in production requires her immediate attention.

Back at her desk fifteen minutes later after settling a minor disagreement between two employees over a quality control issue, she finds herself staring at the dreck she had written earlier: “New technology blah, blah, blah, advances in substrates, blah, blah, blah, most cost-effective blah, blah, blah…” Good god, it is the most boring bunch of drivel she has ever read. Perhaps she needs a little downtime. Ten or fifteen minutes playing solitaire might empty her mind, yes indeed. That is what she will do.

Three wins and four losses later, our heroine once again stares at the promotional piece. She wonders if her eyeballs are bleeding. She is glad she isn’t one of those political bloggers who are forced by modern writing standards to use words such as egregious, shrill, and other words of that ilk, with ilk itself being one of those words. She wonders, too, if because there is so much reading material available these days, if anyone really reads anything at all, or do they all just skim? Perhaps she should Google “adult reading attention span.” Lots of links on Adult Deficit Disorder and Dyslexia appear in the first twenty or so links. Her mind wanders. She is reminded of a signature line she read on a message board: “They say I’ve got ADD, but they don’t understand… Oh, look! A chicken!”

She decides to take a brisk walk around the building. Surely that will clear her mind. She rounds the corner of the building just as UPS arrives to collect the day’s shipping. She chats with the driver about the weather, and weekend plans. She recalls having an identical conversation with him last Friday afternoon. He boards his truck and she wishes him a pleasant weekend. He wishes her the same.

With the shipping gone, she is free to lock up the production area for the weekend. She takes extra care to make sure all chemicals have been properly stored and all doors double locked. She writes a note to the production supervisor about one workstation which was not tidied up before shift end. She returns to her desk. She stares at the dreck, the dreck stares back. It has not written itself while she was gone. Another fantasy is dashed.

Our heroine is defeated. She looks at the clock and decides to lock up early. She hopes her husband remembers that she likes an ice cold martini at the end of the work week. Some fridays she arrives home to find one waiting in the freezer. She hopes today is one of those fridays.