Why I Wasn’t in the Meeting

I know I was supposed to be in that meeting, and I WAS in the meeting at the beginning. Did you see me in the meeting?

Then my internet connection went out. Poof. I got kicked out of the meeting.

My computer, which is the desktop from which I teach my synchronous sessions and try to have all my Zoom meetings, recently suffered a hard drive failure. I had to ask a 35-year-old “teenager” what to do when my computer slowed to a halt earlier this month because hard drive failure wasn’t in my realm of possible problems. Having an advanced degree in something, especially in something so smart-ass-sounding as information science, makes it seem like you should understand computers intimately, should know how to take apart and reassemble your desktop, but in reality it only means you know more than average about a very narrow slice of the overall life pie and that you likely, like me, get confused about whether numerators or denominators are on top; which is larger, kilobytes or megabytes; or why a SPARQL query isn’t as glittery fabulous as it sounds.

It took a lot to figure out what was wrong with it and then to find someone to fix it. It was gone for three days, which really isn’t that bad, considering. This is how I learned that my mechanical hard drive had indeed failed. When I got my computer back, I had to reinstall stuff. Some things were forgotten, like Zoom, which installed itself a couple days ago when I had my first post-hard-drive-fail Zoom meeting. So I felt super prepared for this one meeting. I have Zoom installed. I have a new hard drive. I am golden.

So I got kicked out of the meeting. Just before the meeting I was trying to print out my Family Medical Leave Act paperwork so that I could get my brother’s doctor to sign off on it so that I can take leave ASAP to support him in his cancer treatments. But my printer has stopped printing in color. I can’t get the printer to print in color no matter what I do. The color ink tanks are ¾ full. The thing just stopped admitting that color was even a possibility. Kind of like my life. Okay, that was hyperbole. My life is VERY colorful. As is my language lately.

I googled this and found others online who had the same problem with their Canon G6020s and I tried what they tried, up to a point, but nothing has worked so far. Even after the hard drive was fixed and I figured that might have had something to do with it, it still refuses to print in color. I have cleaned heads and nozzles and updated drivers. Nada. There is one further option that I haven’t tried yet that involves a deep cleaning of the printer nozzles, but I’m putting it off because it uses, according to one who did it successfully online, “an insane amount of printer ink” to carry out. And the ink is the expensive part of owning a printer, as anyone can tell you, and is also the reason that I almost never print in color. So all my efforts to save on color printing have likely come down to this: I now need to waste like half of my precious color ink supply to try and see IF this might be what enables the printer to once again print in color. So I can get FMLA. So I can stop crying in meetings.

(I have a dear friend who admitted to buying a new printer every time this stuff happens. She has about 27 printers at this point, hidden away so that her husband doesn’t catch on. I might be exaggerating. But I TOTALLY get this. You know who you are. I love you to pieces.)

My brother’s doctor needs this form printed out and it doesn’t print out properly in black and white, even in grayscale, which, believe me, I’ve tried. And they won’t accept the file emailed to them. It must be printed and dropped off at the cancer clinic in the hospital. Meaning I must put clothes on and drive somewhere, park, check in at the hospital main desk after a Covid screening, and then make my way up to the third floor. Which also means I should stop and see my brother who is currently still there after dehydration and malnutrition caused his recent physical collapse while waiting for his cancer treatment to start last week. The cancer center must fax the form back to my employer within about 9 days now. And counting. But who’s counting?

On top of this, when I got the desktop back, the repair person had moved a few things around inside, like the Dropbox files, which are now in a different place than they were before. I began to notice that when I worked on the laptop, prepping for classes, which start in 6 days, things were not getting updated between the laptop and the desktop. This is a terrifying scenario. So I’m trying to figure this out as well. Why can’t everyone just play nice?

So when I was in the meeting a few minutes ago – you did see me in the meeting, right? – there was all this going on in my personal background. And then the internet went out. I checked my phone and the laptop, and they both had internet and the Wi-Fi signal was just fine. I restarted the desktop and, in the meantime, I logged back into the meeting on my phone, with the camera off, because by this point I was ugly crying out of frustration and despair. I got back into the meeting just before we separated into breakout rooms, where I was going to help lead the DYO discussion. I saw the link to join the breakout room, but it was from my phone, and my eyes were super red from crying, and I couldn’t do it. DYO stands for Do It Yourself. Yeah. Right. I need the NCD discussion. No. Can. Do.

This is why I am no longer in the meeting. I have so many things going on and I can’t balance them and I can’t balance my life, my emotions, my time, my responsibilities. Is this depression? anxiety? ADHD? executive dysfunction? The short answer, YES. This is what it all looks like when they get together and party hard.

So when you ask someone if they can do this one simple thing, if they can attend just one more short meeting, if they can get you a print out of this short form, and they break down in tears and crumble before you, maybe you will have an idea of what might be going on behind their eyes, behind their screen, behind the seemingly simple ask that they Just. Can’t. Do. It might also explain why they get up and leave and run through a prairie with a butterfly net every few days, why they wander for two hours at night before bed just to clear their head before failing at sleep, or why they fall to the ground and gush over some inane, mundane pattern in the gutter. These may be what they are built for and what saves them from going full throttle over the edge.