Day: May 5, 2008

multitasking is not so easy on the computer

(names have been protected to protect the innocent)

i made a mammoth error on the computer today. i was talking on the phone, and carrying on an msn chat to three people. one chat had two people.

the second chat had one person.

chat one was longer.

i am good enough friends with person two that i can leave the conversation abruptly, and it wasn’t like she was being overly attentive to the chat, so after asking, "are you there?" once, i went back to our original topic and summarised before signing off, "i think they should break up". young love is so exciting.

and then i got back to my phone conversation.

an hour or so later i went back to my computer and saw the train wreck that i had left behind me.

person number two was fine except for a very polite WTF by my "he’s giving space but showing love/support" … and a reminder of how emotionally distant he can be.

however i had written on person number one’s chat "i think they should break up". not so pleasant for person one to hear. especially since the above lines were counselling of the exact opposite sort.

it is a stupid enough error that happens often enough in the computer age, but how hurtful is it? it has happened to me a couple of times, and it makes me feel very very bad.

it’s not like i wanted not to pay attention, i just got confused. i was listening to everyone, but i got overwhelmed for a minute.

so now i get to start with the apologies. and the internet as an excuse is so trite. bla.

today i miss the days when fax machines were the newest coolest forms of communication.

so it has come to this

you think you know your husband.

you talk with your girlfriends, listen to them list their husbands shortcomings or little habits and you say, "oh, mine would never do that, he’s too busy doing this…" and you are confident in your answer.

i was pretty confident too, until the other day, when was checking through old sites, and i found a carefully concealed one.

stands and mounts

stands and mounts

stands and mounts?

i didn’t click on it, i couldn’t, because my hands were paralysed while my brain raced along pounding thoughts into my heart. i waited for emotion to come through me, "here i am, a statistic, my husband surfing porn sites…how do i feel? how am i going to handle this? will i tell anyone? should he be ashamed? does this mean i have been a bad wife? not as "active" as i should have been? "

thoughts flowed through my veins, where emotions didn’t go and where blood was pumping freely.

apparently surfing for porn is a very common thing, but i never imagined my husband would do it. surfing for ways that you can hide junk so your wife can’t hide it, ordering new shirts with cool Biblical sayings on them, that’s his sort of thing…and while the man has a libido, i didn’t think porn was his thing.

yet here was stands and mounts telling me that quite obviously, it was.

i decided insulting him was a better way to go. if i was going to start feeling emotion (guilt had already struck) i would insult him. who on earth would visit a place called stands and mounts. surely there were better, classier sites than that?

and finally, my fingers unclenched themselves and i got enough heat in them to coordinate the mouse and move them. to click on the site.

i shut my eyes, again cursing myself for not getting net nanny and wondering if this is why charles hadn’t wanted to get net nanny.

and opened my eyes, and found myself looking at six wooden television stands.

yes, www.standsandmounts.com is a site for television stands.

of course, then i got furious. i am trying to downsize the junk in our house and he is trying to bring more in? does he not listen to me at all?

it wasn’t a porn site !!!!!