My mother (z”l) used to say (in Yiddish, it sounds better: Men tracht und Gott lacht), “Man plans and G-d laughs.” That certainly explains my day.

Plan: no appointments outside the office. no makeup. bad hair day OK. can wear sweats. will dig deeply into writing 4 complex proposals. will IM programmers and work out complexities. will get ConvergeSouth presenters’ travel details. Will own this day.

Reality: TW blows a router at 9 a.m. no internet. will send repair person with new cable modem “around lunchtime.” exchange server goes hooey. can’t log on. can’t see network files. can’t get to web sites we’re designing because can’t get to network files. email is offline. voip phones are down. cell phone racks up minutes by the minute. best-engineers-in-the-world come over at 10:30 and stay till 2:00 fix most things. internet re-appears magically around noon (guess the modem wasn’t broken). engineers do amazing things but hours slip by. drivers on mystical hardware items are updated. antique scanner won’t work with Vista. browse for new flatbed scanner and watch another $300 fly away toward newegg. learned that folks think we have a multi-media press kit for ConvergeSouth and darn, it’s a good idea, wonder what that costs? wrote and ’sent’ email (to an offline email app) for speakers’ travel info; set up travel spreadsheet; need volunteer drivers. Lassiter informs me that there’s free wifi in Troy, NC and I can’t get the stuff I pay for here. Usher out engineers, deal with dogs, help Kid #2 with temporary notebook, solve the region’s web problems (it seems to me), and notice that my diet cream soda is untouched and unfizzy since 8:30 a.m. when I started this dark day in front of my new 22″ monitor. This day had such promise.

The fix: sat outside with doggies for 30 minutes and watched them chew rawhide. Turned off cellphone. Watched daylight turn into night. Took two Tylenol.

G-d laughs. Or at least chuckles.