11:59 p.m. - 2002-09-09
Counting Your Blessings
It feels like there is fire flowing through my veins. In the room there is the scent one finds deep in a pine forest and the sound of a waterfall somewhere out of sight. Sensory hallucinations, of course. Maybe I'm still just fighting that virus.
Some days my mind is as blank as the computer screen when I start to write. Sometimes the words flow down my fingertips to the keyboard without my even knowing time has passed. Sometimes a series of events triggers a whole torrent of thought that make it hard to find a thread to start it all off and tie it all together - like today.
My youngest son reads my state of mind often before I am even aware of it. Quite often we have similar events occurring in our day to day lives. Yesterday he insisted we were going to watch a movie together. That's something we do regularly but it was his choice that was unique and the formal invitation to the "viewing".
When the boys' Dad left, I think I brought home every comedy ever made, that was on video tape, within the first six months of the "Big Announcement". My sons were grieving deeply the loss of their father and felt it was their fault - they weren't good enough somehow. On top of that the media had decided that their whipping boy for all society's ills was going to be the youth of the community - especially children of single MOMS. It was everywhere my children looked. Quite a change in perception for something over which none of us had control and which none of us had had any say. Their mental health was as important to me as their physical well-being, so I found something every day to make them laugh or to make them feel positive about life. So we watched Mrs Doubtfire over and over again (Thank You Robin Williams) and every other movie he ever made. Among the best of the comedies Jim Carey, the Marx Brothers (I love Groucho), Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Monty Python, Bugs Bunny and the Disney classics. The favorite of the Disney movies was Aladdin - "I'm not just a street rat and I'm not worthless".
Anyway, my youngest had popcorn ready and we watched Aladdin last night.
This morning was as bad as I thought but not in the way I had expected. My co-worker and I got an e-mail that equated the loss of the editing in the spreadsheet with a huge financial loss . Now, given that all it cost the company was a few hours of my co-worker's time to create and recreate the second sheet of data and my lost productivity - I don't think so. We hadn't requested any action on the part of their IS team; we had just informed them of the problem as we had been directed to do in an e-mail sent to all members of staff in June. It was apparent from that e-mail that there had been some breaches in their security that had been going on for a long time. You don't warn people not to leave their PC unattended at any time without taking several precautions first, unless there is reason to be concerned.
It wasn't me who got the personal blast this time round, it was my supervisor. He was blindsided first thing this morning about our problems. I don't know what was said but it left him reeling. I'm not sure this is worth it, all bravado aside.
The upshot was that we were told to let the liaison purge whatever records she didn't feel were necessary from our folder this afternoon. We were directed to take no further measures to protect our spreadsheets other than passwording them, but of course to give the password to the people who might need to use them - just in case we were hit by a bus or something.
As fate would have it, I got a call from my youngest son's school about an hour later asking me to attend a meeting at 2 pm to straighten out that communication glitch I mentioned last week, so I left shortly after lunch and didn't return today.
My day ended by being able to ensure that he was safe and protected. You see, the problem he was having stemmed from some on-going bullying that had occurred at his junior high. It included a group of six or so boys some of whom seemed to favor knives and whose parents saw no problem with that. It took nearly a year of me talking to the school administrators to get them to act. In their defense, there are no teeth in the school board policies to allow them to act and it wasn't until I told them that I was going to ask the police to attend with me when I went to each boys' home to talk with their parents that they did anything to stop it. It turned out these little darlings were terrorizing a lot of students and shaking them down./P>
Unfortunately, because I was the one that forced the issue it left my son as a target despite what the school staff did. The last thing I wanted was for him to have to deal with these jerks again in Senior High. I asked that he be transferred to a different school than the one where the bullies were headed. The adminstrators at the new school were concerned because my son's attendance had been disrupted - small wonder. Anyway, the principal from the Junior High and a couple of my son's teachers spoke with the Senior High staff and we got everything worked out today so he can attend someplace where he will feel safe.
There is a silver lining in every situation. I guess somedays one just has to look a little harder.
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