Separation Anxieties

Day 2 of Norm without his home office computer and it's not a pretty picture. I guess that you don't realize what a big part of your life being connected has become until you lose that connectivity. I found myself feeling strangely disconnected from what I guess has become my world - email, the Internet, my Web applications and sites, many of the things with which I spend my time at home.

I watch little television anymore, because there is always something to be done on-line. I maintain 5 Web sites, so they take up a good bit of time. Then, there are the needs of the 30+ home buyer clients that I've got in various stages of looking. Much of the daily contact with them is through automated searches, but there is normally some weekly personal email contact. Then there's email itself, which averages 50-60 message a day. I can get to them from the office systems, but I can't use my Outlook there to file the ones that I want to keep, so the ones that I want to save are piling up in my account. Of course I can get to this blog from the office systems, too; so I can keep posting, but it's somehow just not the same.

I get the same way on vacations. I can go 2-3 days without having access to my "stuff", but after that I get antsy to get back to it. That drives my wife nuts; because, she is able to just kick back and let go of the stuff at home for up to a week (then, even she starts missing our dog and the comfort of the home routines). I suppose that a psychiatrist would call this some form of separation anxiety; or some other polite term to describe a person who becomes a basket-case, if his computer goes down. I don't care. I just want my system back up and my connectivity to the Internet world back at my home office. I hope that the repair guy gets it fixed and back to me tonight; otherwise I'll be the guy howling at the moon off in the distance.