Crashing

You know how when you’re working on something in excel, and IMing someone at the same time, and the next thing you know excel goes blank, then it comes back, and you can see your numbers for a second, then it goes blank and, back and forth like it’s blinking, but it still doesn’t say that it isn’t responding, so you tell the person on the chat that this is happening, and how weird it is because it’s shifting back and forth, and the person suggests you save your work, and you’re like, “fuck my life,” and hating your job and wondering when it will all be over, and not just your job, because it’s too late to save your work. The ball is spinning and you’re exercising your patience, except also wondering what you’ll have to re-do, or if, because it’s different this time and maybe if you wait a little longer, while chatting online with your co-worker (even though he sits right next to you) it will recover. But meanwhile, it is late in the day and you were hoping to finish and leave, but now you are obsessed with getting back to where you were, at least, and then the IM crashes, and you can’t even talk to your co-worker anymore (even though he sits right next to you), which is really weird because that’s not usually the thing that crashes, so maybe excel isn’t crashing, and you open up a new instance of excel, just to see what happens, because now you have all this time on your hands, and it works. In this new instance, you can navigate around blank cells even while the other eight instances that were open when the hiccups started are still trying to work it out. You close the good session, hoping maybe that disrupts the cycle and tricks the computer into thinking something finished, but it doesn’t, that never works, and then you try to close some of the eight you don’t need, but they’re all interconnected at this point, until finally the program suddenly gains that self awareness that it is going nowhere. It realizes what is happening. It’s like nirvana, as close to God as it will ever be. It knows itself and that it must change. That’s when it gives you two options. You can wait, or you can close and recover.  

My life is like that, except in life I always choose wait. With excel, “enough of this already.”