Cat-tastrophe

Having my daughter home during isolation has been a blessing. During the day, we worked across from each other at the dining room table as her two felines, Tillie and Leroy had the run of the house. With only essential trips out and both of us occupying the space, some days there seemed to be a large amount of mishaps going on inside the fray.

The most memorable day to date, I’ll loving refer to as CAT-tastrophe. Our morning began like any other day. Once we each were done with our normal morning routines, we both began working at the dining room table. We had been challenging each other to drink lots of water throughout the day as we had our first of many glasses sitting at our make-shift desks.

Queue Leroy…….as he jumped up on the table and before Hannah could stop him from playing…..he accidentally kicked over her glass of water right onto her laptop………her work laptop. She immediately went into battle-ready action, pulled out the electrical cord, sprung with it onto the floor and into the sun, grabbed a cloth napkin and began wiping it down. I ran to get a few towels to help her and to mop up the remaining water cascading down the table, chairs then floor.

You can imagine Hannah’s delight and mood. I decided it was best for me to be her silent wing-man and gather any supplies that were needed as she began to calmly freak out. She had two years worth of data from her lab and field studies she was sure she just lost, which included the report she’d been working on that hadn’t been saved. To put it lightly, I could tell, it wasn’t going to be a very good day.

She needed to get the battery out and had to tackle several screws securing the back. My tool box just happened to be in Milwaukee at her place instead of home. She began rummaging around the draw next to the stove…..you know one of those junk draws you’ve been meaning to organize but hadn’t……drat! Somehow she managed to find a tiny screwdriver that looked like a Duracell battery that must have been a freebie with a purchase….perfect. As she began to unscrew them, they wouldn’t come out. Time was not on her side and she eventually forced it open and attempted to dry any damp surfaces.

She sent a message to the her IT team and they instructed her to use a blow dryer. I ran to get one and then remembered I had a space heater and sprinted to the garage to retrieve it. After several rounds she asked if I any any extra laptops. I actually had two and ran to get them. I needed to find the power cord….Alleluia…..which I found after pulling several extra cords out of an amoire and onto my bedroom floor. I had two laptops and only one power cord. After plugging the first one in, I heard a hum……hip hip hooray but the screen remained black then went silent….argh. Tried the second one……it also started to hum and viola….now all we needed was to remember the password. We tried every FREAKING combination we could think of again and again…..and NADDA.

However, if we had a USB flash drive we could reset it. Hannah was desperate for one and I didn’t have a clue if I had one or where it would be. Suddenly, I remembered I had two containers of old work stuff I thought might have just what we needed. I ran to the garage, found the containers, brought them in and began to take everything out and onto the floor.

I had almost gotten though both of them when it was decided by the IT team and her boss, she needed to get a new laptop. It was now several hours later, still no working laptop, the fear of lost data, debris of the day all over the floor, and the looming need to drive back to Milwaukee.

Once she had gathered what she needed and headed out the door, I finally took a breath! As I looked around the house, computer fixing clutter lay on the make-shift battlefield, I was exhausted and I’m pretty sure so was she. Tillie and Leroy were no worse for the wear, even though I’m pretty confident Leroy knew something not-so-great happened earlier in the day that caused such a CAT-tastrophe. What a day! Do you have similar stories to share?

xoxox…..Sheryl

PS…..Later, I continued rummaging through the remaining work container…..and guess what….at the very bottom was a little red flash drive!…..LOL!