Entry011002

01/10/02 - I got a $20 tip, but they won’t be giving it to me ... They being my work. Monday
through Friday at 4 a.m. I wake up this very sweet lady, named ... Sweetie. Actually, I usually speak to her boyfriend (“good morning, it’s Sweetie’s wake up call,”) but occasionally Sweetie answers and then we may chat a couple of minutes. She has cancer. She needs to get up early to take care of cancer stuff, day in, day out. Well, as a holiday token of appreciation I learned that she had sent a personal check to me with her monthly payment to the office. Nope, they don’t allow that, they sent it back. However, they felt the need to tell me about it? I guess so I could thank her for it even though I didn’t get it. Not a problem. There is no need for her to tip me, a thanks will do. It’s my pleasure. But, that leads me in to something I read today ... My horoscope. It said something like continue to give to others, the pleasure you get will be well worth the effort. Oh yea? OK, I believe you. Well, obviously I’m not thinking about sweet ladies here. And except for sweet ladies and four kids that I know, I’m frankly sick of giving. It’s probably that pleasure part that is bothering me. Oh, there’s definitely some pleasure, but there’s something missing. I think it’s the thanks part. I swear, if I ever receive a $20 tip for this ... Shoot me now. Again, a
thanks will do. There’s something about appreciation that goes a long way for me.

And that leads me to thinking about all the giving I have written about in my personal journal and how precious the memories are and how I would die if anyone ever read these highly personal moments. I had a scare not too long ago. I received a sort of strange e-mail with attachments from a person I knew very well. I wondered about the e-mail, it sort of sparked my curiosity. Well when I opened the attachments I was sort of shocked. It was a highly personal letter written by this person. I wasn’t shocked at the letter because, like I said, I knew this person well and I had known about all the events described. What I was
shocked at was that the letter had been sent to me. Why? What’s this about? It turned out to be a computer generated virus. The virus sent it to me. It had randomly sent files from his hard drive to various people in his address book. OMG, that freaked me out. I had been infected. I could just imagine what my address list would think if they got one of my highly personal journal entries (all saved to hard disk) out of the blue. I envisioned a very large project at hand, one I still need to do. I’m figuring I need to take all my journal files off the hard drive and store them on 3 inch discs, all three years of them. But then I took a look at my address book. Barring my youngest son’s violin teacher, there wasn’t one
person on that list that would have been shocked (it’s a small list). They know me all too well. But you never know, maybe they thought I was making all that stuff up ...