It’s blinking at me.
I think it’s keeping time by the second. I’ve sat here long enough staring at it and four of its cousins, so I should know. A steady tick, tick, ticking away of moment after moment. Taunting.
Laughing.
Daring me to write.
Something. Anything.
It knows I have deadlines.
Day job deadlines. Dream job deadlines. Household and family deadlines. All with their respective cursors.
Blink, blink, blink.
It knows I can’t stand the haphazard tapping of Little Miss’s high heels, the slurping of the cats as they bathe themselves on the bookshelf above my desk, or the random throttle revving of Mr. Redneck Guy and his dilapidated motorcycle down the road. Even the birds tweeting outside my office window are getting on my nerves.
Not to mention the donkey calls of the, well, donkey from the farm two properties down. (Why? Why a donkey? I can hear him braying over the air conditioning.)
So it just keeps blinking.
Steady, silent.
I fear it may become sentient, read Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and start thumping right out of the monitor, driving me the rest of the way insane (I worded that very carefully. It’s a short drive, and a few may argue I’m already insane. I can own that).
The cursed cursor. One is waiting for me to DO SOMETHING on each of four other documents. Waiting for me to finish up, get started, continue on, or perhaps have a unique idea, then save/close/send the dumb document and move on already.
And lest anyone confuse the tiny vertical blinking line in a Word Document with the three small dots or the twirling circles, let me elaborate. The three small dots means YOU’RE doing something and I’m waiting on you. The twirly thingamajigs indicate SOFTWARE is doing something and I’m waiting on it.
The evil vertical blinker, on the other hand, is waiting on ME to do something. Anything. Usually of a productive nature. Usually requiring the stringing together of coherent words one after another to form likewise coherent sentences, then paragraphs, then scenes or blog sections or conclusions to letters to insurance companies, doctors or clients or, or, or…*
*And right here, I temporarily lost the ability to be coherent. Because four other blinking cursors in four other documents are waiting on me. They’ve synchronized their blinks, creating a nearly audible thumping away of the time as midnight approaches, and I’m still stuck back on something that should’ve been done Tuesday.
A quick glance at the calendar tells me this is the last full week of May. A pang of panic has started in my toes and creeps up my spine.
Another document opens. A fifth cursor adds itself to the silent melee.
So, before the five start taking cues from my ducks-not-in-a-row and the unicorns un-watered, and before they start multiplying like bitty blinking bunnies, I bid you adieu.
May your vertical cursors not blink at you for more than a few seconds, may those folks behind your three little dots send their responses quickly, and may your twirling thingamajigs spit your content out with lightning speed.
