Sorry, Erin, for digressing… hope you don’t encounter covert/cover charges in Paris.

I died… too slowly… when in the same week my laptop at work crashed and my personal laptop said its graceless goodbyes, and (no, the torture didn’t stop then) in assessing just what files I lost, I discovered two of my zip disks were fickle… defective, really.

At that time, I had no pager and no phone line at home. (In communicating with people, I had choices bereft of etiquette… surprise them via vp or ask people if I could borrow their Sidekicks and log onto my AIM account for a teeny bit.) The thug I am, I did the vp bit.

I recovered quickly, and I attribute that to three things: an understanding supervisor, a magician friend who interred my hard drive to an external drive, and the Arizona evening weather for it enabled me to run for as long as it took to ease me out of my rage.

Since then, I’ve started to regularly save work files to the company server, personal files to CDs, and whatever’s pressing at the moment to my flash drive. Oh yes, I also got a Mac. (You just know some of them nutso Apple loyalists are cheering now and shouting, “We got another convert! We got another convert!”)

But enough about debacles past… Four days in Paris? I’d be happy to leave my laptop home and my pager tucked in my backpack the entire while. Tough to work the pager when glugging red wine and munching on cheese. And should some central data bank crash? I’d be overjoyed to be off the grid. Just got to carry a card in my pocket saying, “Hello hospital administrator, I may be unconscious but no, I’m not allergic to penicillin.”