Continuity

Watching Matlock reruns last night, I think I spied a palm tree along a street that was supposed to be in Atlanta. I don't think there are palm trees in Atlanta, but maybe I have been away so long I have forgotten them. A continuity glitch?

I’ve been having some of those myself. My laptop failed in the spring, and I have only recently come to accept its death. A few more days, and maybe I will have the hand-me-down desktop (a nice gesture on my boss’s part) set up and operating. But it will probably take longer than that to rebuild e-mail address lists.

The work computer has a leviathan of a client relationship management system, so I am cautious about letting my friends and family drift into it. Correspondents who are accustomed to seeing me e-mail back in minutes now may not get a response for days. It’s all very different.

New jobs do this. So much of our social network is linked to where we work, even more to our electronic complex of phones and computer. Disconnect one strand, and big swatches of the fabric of daily life unravel. It’s almost as if our the electric impulses in our tiny brains merge with these other machines, at least for a time, till continuity breaks.