No social distancing happening at this Apple store in Roseville MN.

Earlier this week I spilled water on the keyboard of my laptop.

::sob::

I mopped it up as quickly as possible and attempted to dry it out, but my efforts were less than successful. The machine would boot up — v-e-r-y slowly — then work fine for about three minutes, when it would begin to slow down. After six or eight minutes it was so slow as to be unusable.

::sob x2::

My computer is my life. I cannot get along without it. All my treasurer records (five entities) are on it, plus everything else in my life. So Friday afternoon I took it to the nearest Apple store (photo above). They took possession of it and promised it would be back in three to five days. I chose to pick it up when it is ready rather than have them mail it to me because we have had some difficulties with deliveries recently.

Today Apple closed all its stores worldwide (except China).

::sob x3::

When I got back from a meeting this morning (more on that below) there was a message on the answering machine and an email from Apple, both instructing me to call a certain number, which turned out to be the store that had my computer. But when I called, no matter how I went through the automated oral phone tree, I ended up at the message, “We are sorry but our store is now closed.”

::sob x4::

It turns out that Apple plans for the stores to be closed for two weeks, and I can get along on my old MacBook Air for the time being. I had to delete a fair number of files on it from my Dropbox, the place I store all my data, to free up hard drive space on the laptop. (Dropbox mirrors its files on the computer onto the cloud storage.) (HD on old computer < HD on newer computer) So far that is working fine.

This is an infinitesimal sob story compared to the situations of so many others, both those who are afflicted with the virus or COVID-19 and those for whom being sequestered is a potential economic and psychological disaster. But it is my sob story and I am sad about it…

Update! Just got a call from the Apple store. Computer now scheduled to be mailed to me, so I should get it two weeks sooner. Yay!

So. That meeting Saturday morning was with two women to discuss the local LWV’s budget. We met at a local coffee shop, where, of course, we all had some kind of caffeinated beverage. Two of our coffees were in identical paper cups. At one point I picked up another’s coffee, took a drink, and realized my error; I got a clean cover for it and apologized.

A few minutes later I picked up her cup again, but this time I caught my error in time. Just to remind myself I labeled the cups.

And now, for something not completely different. Warning: NSFW.