People who know me know that I have a sub-personality who goes by the name of 'Fritz the Wonder Fuck'. 'Fritz' is not a separate personality, nor do I black out and come to later on after giving Fritz rule of my head. Fritz is more like a pooka with an attitude, and guardian angel with a mean sense of humor. If there is any way for something to go horrible wrong with my life, Fritz will find it. He has copies of the first three books of Murphy's Law and regards them as an instruction manual for life.
Thursday, March 31 was the deadline for the second quarter of Writers of the Future, a competition that we are encouraged to enter in our workshop. I decided on which story had the best chance of being publishable and sent it to a friend on Tuesday night. Wednesday morning I got his comments back and worked on it all day, went to work, came back and worked on it even more that evening. At 2 a.m. I e-mailed it back to him. He returned it with more comments early Thursday morning and I went to work on the final polish. I finished at 11:30 a.m. Time to print it out, get it to the post office, and get to work at 3. Fritz decided that this was all too easy.
I saved my story and my Finder crashed. I use an older Mac running an older OS, and I know it can be tempermental. No worries, I thought. I decided against trying to print the story after the Finder crashed, and I decided against e-mailing it to my friend. I decided to reboot my computer, then get on with it. This was a mistake.
The crash was severe enough to make my hard drive unbootable. No problem. I have system disks. I booted up off of the system CD and it could not repair, nor mount, my hard drive.
Problem. I took it to a local repair shop after calling my boss telling him that I'd be a little late to work. The repair shop couldn't get the computer to boot either. They really didn't know how to fix a Mac. They are more focused on hardware. There's a Mac store in town, so I picked up my computer and took it down there. They said it was a three day wait to get things fixed. I gave up on writers of the future. I got to work at 5. Normal work hours are 3 to 5, but we had a meeting that afternoon at a local pub for a get together and serious discussion about work.
I started to drink. One of my co-workers, on hearing my story, advised me that the post office by the airport was open until midnight, and another one asked if my friend who had commented on my story had a copy and would he let me borrow his machine. I borrowed a cell phone and he was amiable.
So I call my wife, letting her know I'd be home God-knows-when, then I head over to his apartment and try to recreate my final edits. I get to the post office at 9 p.m. and make sure that the mail is dated the 31
st. I sleep a lot on Friday.
I didn't get my computer back until Wednesday, and I didn't have a chance to set it up again until Thursday morning, but I managed to whip up a small bit of flash fiction by Friday, so my new goal of a story a week is 1 for 1.
