The fact that I have not posted a Besst in a few days does not mean that I have not had my Besst moments.

Not at all.

One fact that will not make The Daily Besst, however, is the fact that I am becoming more and more technologically restricted in my own home. First, WordPress won’t let me use my Bluetooth keyboard with my iPad on their site; then I was even unable to improvise with the hated virtual keyboard. To add insult to gadget injury, the kids’ computer monitor wouldn’t fire up so I could use *that* computer to post.

That last situation has been amended now, and so here we go: a Veritable Avalanche of Besst.

1/30/13:

Work was a blur. But I wore boots for the first time in something like thirty years.

1/31/13:

Work was another blur, with one exception:

What I do is manage analysts, and that means that frequently we send analyses out to our customers. Historically this has always given me the willies, because it feels like I’m pulling a pin on an informational grenade and hurling it over the firewall and then ducking while I wait for the explosion.

Analysis is tricky. Sometimes you get it stone-cold right, and all you get back are ‘thank yous.’ Sometimes you get a tiny detail wrong, and someone politely and privately points it out, allowing you to quietly fix it and re-send. Sometimes something catastrophic happens, like you manage to mis-sort the whole mess and so Employee A’s calculation gets fudged up into Employee K’s numbers and not only do you look like an idiot, but someone invariably hits ‘reply all’ to make sure that everyone and their dog knows you did something analytically ridiculous.

You do what you can, of course, to mitigate this risk. I have a list of reminders tacked to my monitor that I run through before I send out anything, each one a living testimony to some horrendous error I’ve made in the past. Because when I make an error like that it makes me cringe into eternity.

So on Thursday evening at about 6 pm I was sending out a set of analyses and wincing every time I pulled the pin on the pineapple and hit the ‘send’ button.

I left work, and stopped to buy gas. While the pump pumped, I checked my email on my phone, where of course I found what could have been an exploding grenade: a recipient pointing out an error. An error I wouldn’t be able to look into until I reached the end of my commute, some thirty-five minutes away.

Old Bess would have freaked, and maybe called one of the analysts on my team, right there in the parking lot of the Circle K, to check her file to tell me WHAT IN GOD’S NAME I HAD SCREWED UP. Or I would have fretted all the way home.

Instead, I thought about what might be the cause of the soi-disant error and thought what was for me a revolutionary concept: “Eh. I bet it’s not. I’ll check when I get home.”

Which I did, and discovered that it wasn’t an error, at least on my part.

So that gets the win for Besst of Thursday, 1/31.

© E. Stocking Evans 2013