Permanent State of Catch-Up?

I have a fear of being late. It comes from being raised by a mother who lived in her own time zone most of the time. She is about one hour behind everyone else. I paid the price for that at elementary school when I was punished or at the very least suffered the disgusted eye-roll of my teachers. Later, I was older and able to get myself on the bus without assistance, but the damage was done. This fear has not resulted in major trauma to my psyche, but it is fun to bring it up just to tease my poor mother.

A couple of days ago we had our second Internet class, I planned my entire day around it. As life would have it, one of my dear clients needed to talk to me about an hour before the class was scheduled to begin. No problem, I would have plenty of time. Well, the call extended for the hour without me realizing it. I quickly tried to log on, telling myself that I would only be a few minutes late. Not so! The few minutes extended in about 30 as my laptop inexplicably kept freezing up. There is nothing more infuriating to me to sit doing nothing waiting on a frozen computer!!!

I decided to switch to the family desktop. I logged right on in no time. Plugged in the headset and found that it did not work. I could hear everyone, but I couldn't talk. They could see me, and were wondering why I didn't speak. After several more minutes of this, I gave up because I was having visions of throwing both of the computers out the window and running down the road screaming. It took me about 15 more minutes and a glass of wine to accept that I would have to listen to the recording and that everything would be fine.

Next time, I will make sure that I don't have anything else open on my laptop and that I begin signing in much earlier. I will also resist blaming mom for the whole mess.