How Do You Forget That?

I don't wear a watch. I stopped wearing one years ago. Didn't see the point since I felt like the burden of the watch itself was imposing this rigid inflexibility on me. I was, for all intents and purposes, a slave to time. Time was the director of my life and it was a harsh mistress. This isn't to say that I always kept appointments, but rather the watch was a constant reminder of upcoming and scheduled events. And it's not like I really needed the watch to be honest. You're hard pressed these days to go anywhere and not have the burden of the current time forced upon you. Seriously, clocks are just about everywhere. They're on your cell phone. On your dashboard. On any receipt you get. Down there in the lower right hand corner of your computer monitor. Heck, even a lot of phones in your house these days have the time right there. Without going out of your way, it's really hard to get out from under the pressure of knowing what time it is.

And if you wear a watch, I'm not trying to say this in any way shape or form any of this applies to you, but rather this is how I feel about wearing a watch. It just isn't something I want to do. Although in the interest of full disclosure, I should point out there are people that feel differently in regard to me wearing a watch. This has also been complicated in the past when Ginger has bought me a watch as a present and then decided the fact that I wasn't wearing it was somehow disrespectful to her since she spent the time and effort to buy it for me.

So I've noticed over on KennyG's blog that he's had this mini theme about bad parenting running. I think I'm about to be a footnote in his blog. You see, today Ginger called me around 12:30 and asked me to pick up Quinn after school. I assume this was so that Catherine would be able to nap a bit longer and catch up on some sleep. Today though, I was really busy at work, because I made a ton of progress with that hardware I was having trouble with last Friday. Turns out the vendor supplied us with the wrong software for the card we have, so I spent more than a week trying to get talk to this card using an incorrect protocol. Lovely. Mind you, I had been in constant email contact with the support person they assigned me. And none of the suggestions from this support person were really helping. And it was clear they weren't trying to find the problem and were just replying with something. So the past couple of days I kept emailing every hour asking for explanations of why the card was acting the way it was (and my tone in the emails was probably starting to imply I didn't believe the person understood what was going on). It was after my last email around noon today where I explained how every suggestion made in the last three emails was not only incorrect, but based on previous comments I had made, were obviously not going to fix the problem. After that suddenly I got bumped up to the next level of support and someone called me that was actually capable of troubleshooting what my problem was. Needless to say, throughout the rest of the day I was on and off the phone with them as we tried different things before they finally figured out their mistake.

It was just around the time I finally got off the phone with them after they discovered they had given us the wrong software that I got a phone call from home. I answered and it was Quinn. And the first thing I hear is him tell me "You forgot to come pick me up from school." D'oh! I had gotten so engrossed with trying to fix the problem at work I had completely forgotten I was suppose to go pick up Quinn. To be honest, I was probably only half paying attention earlier when Ginger called and asked me to pick him up because I was so wrapped up in trying to fix my problem. Luckily he wasn't too upset about it (and by not too upset I mean not at all). Evidently he had a grand time hanging around helping the teachers clean up. Although now I suspect we have a black mark with the school since how in the world does one forget to get their child. Now I will claim that even had I been wearing the watch (see how I tied this back into the stuff above), I still would have forgotten, simply because I became so engrossed in work that I had blinders on to everything else that was occurring.

The school had apparently called Ginger at home to 'explain' that she had forgotten to pick up Quinn (they didn't know that Ginger had asked me to do it). Sadly, from how I heard the story told, when Ginger saw the school on the caller id she immediately knew that it was because I had forgotten without them even telling her. I wish I could claim this was somehow part of my master plan, like in Bill Cosby: Himself where he screws up a task intentionally so that he won't be asked to do it anymore ("Dad is great, he gives up the chocolate cake!", if you don't get the reference, you really owe it to yourself to rent the standup Bill Cosby: Himself). But no, I can't claim anything of the sort. Although I would bet money that the next time I get asked to pick him up I'll probably get a phone call reminding me to do it fifteen minutes beforehand.

I haven't gotten a lot of pictures of the kids recently, but I got a couple tonight. Nothing spectacular. Catherine is at the sink because when you ask her to wash her hands now, she pulls a chair over to the kitchen sink to get up there and wash them, because it's evidently too much trouble to walk the 20 feet over to the bathroom to wash them there. And even though that first picture of Quinn really looks like he's upset (in theory because I forgot him), that wasn't the case, but I just like the way that picture turned out.