I got a little magnet in the mail from my health insurance company the other day, with a “Nurse Line” phone number on it. I’m supposed to call the Nurse Line when I’m sick to find out if I should go to the doctor. Or, as the card says, to help decide if the “doctor’s office, emergency room, or just self-care is needed.”

Suuuuure. I’ll call my insurance to ask whether I should accrue costly hospital bills for them to pay. Or not.

I’m sure it might depend on whether I had paid my full deductible yet, but I imagine . . .

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Today, I got an e-mail from somebody needing technical help. It was like somebody changed my job description to IT Support and forgot to tell me, which is nothing out of the ordinary where I work.

Hi, I have a login with ‘Editor’ privileges but can’t import or view images in my groups folders. Please help. Cheers, X

I wasn’t the only one getting the wrong e-mail, proved by the next item in my inbox:

i’d like to know who setup this email address and told people to use this as a support contact.

Yeah, I thought. But what do . . .

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In one of those motivational 37-way conference calls the other day, a big cheese told a story about two guys in a boat:

“A leak springs on a boat, and one guy thinks he’s OK, because he’s on the dry side — but they’re both going down. Just because we’re in good shape doesn’t mean we don’t have to circle the wagons.”

I have at least two things to say about this. First off, that guy on the dry side who thinks he’s OK is really stupid. I mean, how big is this boat? The story starts: “There are two . . .

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I just got a new laptop from work. This is a joyous, joyous day.

My old laptop was five years old, which is 127 in laptop years, and my 2002 vintage RAM had gotten very tired. To be brutally honest, it had lost some of its mental capacity.

Sometimes I would try and load a Web site and the hard drive would spin and spin and the laptop would shake and I’d stare at the green bar at the bottom right, never quite filling all the way up, and a bird would chirp outside the window and I’d look out . . .

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Some of my grad-school-persuasion friends, wife, and acquaintances are in serious crunch-time mode; what better time to try out pointless time-wasting free Flash games online?

Double Jeu

Try to keep two balls in the air. Moving the mouse both tilts the inclined plane at the bottom, and moves the Pong-style “paddle” at the top. Keep the bottom ball from rolling off the plane, and the top ball from passing your paddle, as long as you can. My all-time record score is 33 seconds. That’s not really . . .

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