It’s two days before Christmas.  This morning I started thinking of all the people who make my life easier and have started to address cards with gifts for them: the bus driver who gets me safely to New York City every day, the dispatcher at Port Authority who keeps track of the buses and usually just gets complaints about how buses are late; the cleaning woman at the client I am currently working at who comes in after hours and is likely the one who found my iPod and left it on my table.   For years I worked in customer service and complaints were far more frequent than gratitude.   (No one calls a computer help desk to say that there computer is up and running and thanks you for maintaining the network all year.)   So it’s time to thank all the behind the scenes folks and leave some dollars for the bell ringers, too.

It’s only Wednesday and it’s already been “one of those weeks.” Just as I was recovering from the H1N1 virus, my work computer also got a virus in spite of all the protection software and carefully followed rules of not opening any attachments from untrusted sources (which, of course, cannot always be followed as one has to open attachments from bosses and clients.) I learned that iPod batteries do indeed have a life of about two years after twice fully charging the one I received two Christmases ago twice only to have music on the bus ride to work and none on the ride home. I went to set my iPod aside until I had figured out the battery replacement procedures only to discover that I had lost it. I spent a totally unproductive day at a work site yesterday because I was there to make a binder of work papers and was unable to connect to the printer they had provided for me. The IT guys there told me that my two-year old lap top was too old and that the solution was to replace it rather than swap out a printer or a cable. I addressed my Christmas cards on Sunday and found that I had lost all the holiday stamps that I had bought.

I’m not too worried that all of these things are a sign of more bad things to come. I know that they probably are. From time to time my Native American husband and I get a visit from Coyote, the Trickster, who plays lots of mischievous tricks on us. On Monday I found the holiday stamps exactly where I knew I had put them and where I had looked the night before. So I am sure that tomorrow or when the Trickster has had his fun, my iPod will show up, my computer will speed up, and life will return to normal until he decides to pay a visit to us again.