Karma

It was never a question of whether or not I'd be coming in for Panfest 2005; I was always gonna come and help out, couldn't miss it for the world. My intentions from day one were to stay in Kingston until early Monday morning, at which time I'd head home.

So Sunday night nears an end, and Simmy and Coutou convince me to stay for an extra day. "I have nothing doing at home anyway, so what's an extra day," I figured. So I'm chillin' on campus on Monday afternoon, trying to sleep, but all I end up doing is thinking about the events of the past few days (Music Is...), and my current job woes. And then something occurred to me. Later in the day I say to Simmy, "You know I just realized why all this time I wanted to leave Kingston on Monday morning." You see, before I left for Kingston last week, I was completing a paying job of designing and printing some programmes for a Ministry of Education Region 3 function (which began yesterday). Unfortunately, the night before I was heading to Kingston my printer ink ran out, and I still had 20+ programmes to print. I decided to buy the ink in Kingston, and then come back home and print on Monday afternoon.

Somehow that plan slipped my mind while in the hype of Music Is... But Simmy and I thought that even if I got home on Tuesday afternoon I'd still have more than 12 hours to get the programmes printed. "But I just wanted to take care of them early, just in case something were to come up," I said to her.

And something did. After a hectic 3.5 hour, $400 trip home, and a stop by my girlfriend's, I get home, tired as ever at 6 p.m. on Tuesday. I drop my bags, and head downstairs to my computer to get the work going. The PC starts up, green light on, but nothing happens. "That's strange," I thought, "but not new." I've had that problem before, and it's usually solved by disconnecting some piece of hardware which may be acting up. Not this time. I tried unplugging everything at least once. but nothing worked. For hours I toiled trying to get it to work, but I couldn't.

Eventually, after having to try a million different things (too long a story to tell), I got the file opened using a previous version of Publisher on a laptop, which caused some of the formatting to go. So I had to make some modifications to the programme while keeping it looking as close to the original as possible. At 5 a.m., two hours before deadline, I was finally done. I had to be up in two hours, to use up a daypass I got for Starfish Hotel in Trelawny. Of course, for a couple hours at the hotel, I had to sleep!

I got home from Starfish at 6 p.m. yesterday, and by 7 I was in bed. I woke up just before 10 this morning, and about an hour after I decided to try fixing my PC again. I plug everything in, pressed the power button, and it worked like new.

Karma's a bitch.