The Ryno Pen

Your humble blogonaut has a bad habit of “helping” without thinking of the consequences.

Sometimes this does no good to the Party Being Helped: if my (late) pet tortoise is reading this, I’m sorry! Look, I was only four, and the hot bath-plus-scrubbing was exactly what I’d get if I was as whiffy as you were at the time.

Poor bloody thing. There was trouble, of course.

At other times, helping does me No Good Whatsoever: there was the time I was walking home from school in a tropical downpour, and saw all the cute little frogs in the rain-filled cable trench.

With nowhere to beach themselves, and trench sides that rose a couple of feet vertically above the water, I was sure they’d drown. (Logic of a seven-year-old kid not long moved away from inner-city Melbourne there!)

Rescue was attempted. Naturally I fell in, straight on my head, into two feet of water and a foot of very sticky mud. Duh.

I survived, of course. The aforementioned fall on my head, although cushioned by the mud, may have had some bearing on what followed… I eventually wound up wrangling computers.

The computing realm is fraught with opportunities to become a goat (scape or otherwise). Even if you manage to salvage the (allegedly) important Lost Stash Of Data…

… they won’t thank you for it.

Especially if there’s anything they even think you saw.

(Pardon me for snipping the bit about how this kind of reaction does me no good whatsoever. Let’s just say it puts me in that particular frame of mind where the possibilities of me dropping on my head from dizzy heights are a clear and present thing, rather than an inadvertent childhood risk.)

So it was a real strain to hold back today, when accompanying Herself to a Medical Person, and the practitioner’s PC was slower than Very Cold Treacle.

Very much against Better Judgement, and all, but a quick disk cleanup was suggested, and over 150 megabytes of cybercruft went gurgling into the bitbucket. At least the appointment went relatively smoothly after that: the waiting for every… single… step… was rather tedious.

Not wanting to create a source of suffering for Ms Practitioner’s poor sod IT Person, I suggested she just ask the IT Bod nicely about desktop housekeeping and mention the sluggish response time.

With the help of My Beautiful Assistant, I managed to get the message across, despite the irony:
“I’m not taking on new patients just now.”