Cross Wires

Looking down at my watch I noticed Minnie’s white gloved hands stuck at awkward angles, freezing time. I’m sure they’d been like that for days before I noticed. As a child I relied on my parents for time management. Minnie was more of an accessory, the worn red leather strap a piece of flair in my daily routine. I never imagined the ticks would stop and promptly reported to my mother for a fix.

An old battery she said and a new one should do the trick. We replaced the battery and Minnie’s arms resumed their circular movements until they stopped again a couple of weeks later. No battery could fix this problem. Something in my body causes magnetization in the watch and it stops working.

Not scientifically or medically proven but word on the street is there are some of us freaks and the simple solution involves putting a layer between the back of the watch and skin. My watches to date have a piece of leather from the tags on old jeans super-glued on the back.

I’ve since stopped wearing watches. Who needs one with a cell phone? But I was reminded of the magnetic weirdness last week when electrical circuits went berserk around me. It began Tuesday night as I did laundry. We trip the breaker in our apartment often and have almost figured out how many appliances need to be turned off to blow dry our hair. With voltage problems and a temperamental washing machine laundry can be a challenge. That night I’d managed to stop the washing machine and at least one switch on the breaker needed to be reset. The hard part was knowing which switch.

Three different hands attempted to decipher the line of switches, heavy black lines drawn through outdated posts. The combination looks like ancient Hebrew and I looked on helplessly flipping random switches. No logical order and I probably switched the same three five different times. Eventually something worked. Maybe it was the angry kick I gave the machine, but it proceeded to spin and proceeded through my day. If I had only known that the electronics in my life would kick back at the worst moment.

High-strung and dead tired I arrived at the newspaper ready to revamp the sports section. After the first hour and several reboots of my work computer I conceded to merely enhancing the sports agate. By the second hour I was running between two computers and dealing with three helpful co-workers and one IT guy. They’d been restarting my computer and ordering it around with an occasional password from me. I took prep scores at a second computer that asked me to verify every letter I typed in. Try typing a sentence and hitting enter between each character. It’s a nightmare.

As the phone rang for the millionth time and I cursed loudly under my breath the electronics burst with their final showdown. The phones died mid-conversation. Strangely I felt relief for the full nine minutes of non-productivity. Then the phones came back and the computer debugged itself.

I walked across the room and static-shocked myself.