Thrashing About

Our curved-bill thrasher says good morning.

And yeah, he always has that annoyed look. He lands on the feeder and launches into an ear-splitting song, then proceeds to whip his bill back and forth through the seeds, scattering them hither and yon. Every once in a while, he pecks at the glass sides. He eats a few seeds, also.

I'm not sure what is driving the behavior. Maybe birds do weirdly obsessive things, too.

Jeri Smith-Ready (@jsmithready, a wonderful author and terrific gal -- if you haven't checked out her series about all-night vampire DJs, it's worth doing) tweeted yesterday that "Checked e-mail so many times today, fingers permanently frozen in Ctrl-Shift-T position. Will bang head on wall instead."

Which made me laugh.

I have my Outlook set so that send/recieve occurs every five minutes. On both laptops. When my IT guy was autopiloting my work laptop (have you done this? it's kind of freaky: I relinquish control and watch while he runs through my computer settings from the other side of the country. it's kind of Poltergeist-ish), when he saw this, he somewhat primily informed me that HE has HIS set to every 30 minutes.

So?

What? Like he's more patient or something?

I didn't tell him I also hit my send/receive button all the time, too. Anyway.

Which is how all this came up, because my work laptop Outlook started being weird. It's connected to our Exchange server in Arlington, and so is kind of a real-time "live" connection. This is apparently why I shouldn't need to hit send/receive ever. Or why 30 minutes is plenty long enough, because it's always synching. But it's a habit, okay? Only now, when I hit send/receive, it sends Outlook into some kind of loop from computer hell and it helplessly cycles until it crashes.

IT guy doesn't know why. His solution: don't hit send/receive. This is logical, because I don't have to.

But I can't seem to stop.

I know. I know. It's stupid. It's ridiculous. I tell myself not to touch it. I know I can't. And then I'll be working away, click over to my Outlook and reflexively hit send/receive. Scattering those seeds willy-nilly with an angry orange eye.

At least I have company.