essays

Electric Boogaloo

I spent much of last week looking for the electric bill

Actually, it wasn't just the electric bill I lost.

I had been carrying the electric bill around with me, in my briefcase, because it is one of the mid-month bills, and one I've been paying faithfully. ComEd will turn off your power without a backward glance if you fall too far behind.

I remembered I had been carrying it around, but I had no recollection of putting it anywhere.

Meanwhile, at work, I was looking for a copy of an insurance policy on a particular file. I'd been carrying this file around with me for weeks, during my recent appellate brief binge, thinking (allegedly) that I might get to the opinion letter on that file as a change of pace after dinner or over the weekend. As if. Anyway, though I had the file, I couldn't find the policy.

Yes, this too had been in my briefcase. Upon inspection, I discovered that my briefcase was manufactured by Bermuda Triangle Faux-Leather Goods, Inc. I took out each and every paper in the thing -- the creators of Dr. Who may have been inspired by my briefcase -- but I couldn't find the policy.

I tore apart my office looking for it -- putting mounds -- mountains -- of paper into the recycling. That, sadly, had been the probable fate of the policy for which I was looking. It was probably swept up in some other panic clean-up and discarded after first being misidentified.

The electric bill became the subject of a separate search during the course of all this. I began to suspect -- after getting rid of all that paper -- that my electric bill might have been accidentally swept up in the maelstrom.

And the more I looked for things, at home or at work, the more I found things I didn't know where missing. Yet.

It was not a particularly productive week.

Unless you count finding the electric bill -- yesterday -- as an achievement.

And you still can't see my desk.

Curmudgeon is a self-described dinosaur -- an Ozzie and Harriet person living in an Ozzy and Sharon world. And sometimes it confuses the heck out of him. He writes a very amusing blog at Second Effort.

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