This goes back to an earlier post talking about being addicted to the computer and email. I have a serious habit. From the moment my little eyes pop open in the morning to just before I shut them again in the evening, I am jonesing for email.

If it doesn’t come into my Inbox in a steady stream, I start to click that Send/Receive icon – sometimes repeatedly…thinking that I must have just missed downloading something important.

The BlackBerry was supposed to help me get away from my office and in a way it has. I can go to coffee in the morning or run over to my mom’s or out to the store and not feel like I am going to miss an important email. But I do constantly look at it to see if the little red light is flashing.

Yesterday my email host was having problems and I didn’t receive email for several hours. This was almost too much to bear. But I tried to fill my time doing something productive. I had already finished my actual paying work for the day by the time this disturbance occurred, so I decided to try to record some promos for transcription using the new DVD/VHS recorder-player I picked up “out of the box” at Best Buy for a killer deal. Of course, I had already had to buy a new remote to make it work and that afternoon, I then spent the next hour and a half downloading manuals to the player/recorder, printing out the specific pages referring to hooking up the TV to the recorder and digging out the TV manual.

Nothing seemed to work – I tried Line 1 – then Line 2. I flipped each switch this way and that. Pressed a multitude of buttons in various order. Then I thought the problem must be that I had my Bose system in the middle of it. It wasn’t until I had exhausted every possible combination of connections, switches and buttons that the fine print finally popped out at me. “Note: The DVD/VCR cannot record programs if you have cable with no cable box.”

Sigh….

The good news is that by the time I figured out that the only thing my “new” DVD/VCR combo will do is play old VHS tapes and DVDs, the little red light on my BlackBerry was flashing again…email was flowing!