I struggled to keep my cool yesterday. My wife Robbie bought a new printer for her home office, so after dinner when she and my daughter went off to choir practice, I thought I’d install it all for her as a little surprise for when she came back home. I needed to score some points, I reasoned, since our finances have been a source of friction lately. I figured I could get it done in 10 or 15 minutes and then head to the racquetball club.
Her PC froze right in the middle of the print driver installation, and thereafter wouldn’t let me start over because of a corrupt file. Aaarrrggghhh. I could feel my blood start to boil. Every time I tried something to fix the problem, I had to reboot which required a 3 minute wait. After the 3rd reboot, it occurred to me that it was stupid to get all riled up over this small problem, so I started breathing deeply at each subsequent reboot and to resign myself to not getting to the club. Ahhhh, much better.
After an hour and a half, I finally got the damn thing fixed. And I was even feeling a bit smug about how relaxed I was able to get about the whole thing. Then I went downstairs and saw that our dog had peed on the floor. Aaarrgggh. I took him outside and found myself gruffly putting on his chain and shoving him out the garage door. It then occurred to me that I wasn’t as calm and cool about the printer fiasco as I thought.
Robbie was appreciative, but by the time I went to bed, she asked, “Are you mad at me?” I wasn’t but evidently my irritation with the whole evening was still showing, unbeknownst to me. AFOG.