Vampires

Appliances that consume small amounts of power when they're not in use are called "energy vampires." You know, stuff like your Betamax machine that uses electricity to flash the 12:00 numbers all day and all night, even though you only watch your "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" tapes once every couple of weeks.

(A better term would probably be "energy ticks", because vampires are not easily ignored, and tend to siphon off significant amounts of hemoglobin and then go away, whereas ticks can attach themselves unnoticed, and consume trickling amounts over long periods. But I'll admit that the "vampire" terminology does have more linguistic appeal.)

You'd think that as an employee of a "green energy" company, I'd be concerned about stuff like that. But I have to confess that I'm not too worried about it. Oh sure, I turn off the lights when I leave a room, and I avoid the "dark" setting on the toaster...but if there's current being lost because I left my phone in the charger after it was topped off, well, I'm not going to lose any sleep over that.

Yeah, I know. Making such a statement will probably earn me a visit from the political correctness police. But the truth is that if we could figure out cold fusion (or better yet, controlled matter-antimatter conversion), such things wouldn't matter a whit. And if we'd just get our space program going again, the Vulcans are bound to notice and would probably contact us with all those technologies tied up with a neat little bow and ready to rock.

Anyway, the point is that my REAL problem is "time vampires." And I suspect I'm not alone in dealing with this affliction. You see, I start each and every weekend thinking that I'll accomplish glorious things...and then wake up each Monday with the realization that my grand plans have once again been thwarted.

It's not that I don't enjoy weekends. I do. A lot. And I do get some things done. This past weekend, for example, included a nice long phone chat with my son (yeah, he actually remembered Father's Day!), a couple of tough swim practices, and a delightful ride up Highgrade Road. I also made significant progress on producing the DVD of my latest Veteran's History Project interview. But the fridge is empty and the laundry basket is not. And rather than take responsibility for these failings myself, I choose to blame the vampires.

Email, Facebook, ordering new swim goggles online, and reconciling my checkbook -- those are a few of the time-sucking activities upon which I cast blame. Each one tends to offer opportunities for sideways excursions that melt the hours away. For example, when updating my Quicken file, I noticed that one of my mutual fund prices was showing as zero. I knew the market had taken a dip in the last week, but I wouldn't have expected this fairly conservative fund to have suddenly become completely worthless. I tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Long story short; this was a known software bug, and there was a solution on Quicken.com, and it did work. But it took some time to get from identification of the problem to implementing the solution.

Did I need to do that? No, probably not. But I'm a nerd, and things like that tend to capture my attention and keep me from doing important things. And because I was a broadcasting major in college, it's only natural that certain types of TV programming will become a distraction as well. Therefore, it's obvious that my weekend's time is not spent productively because of deficient software engineering, television scheduling executives, manufacturers of chocolate-covered ice cream products, and various other external forces over which I have no control. They're all vampires, and I am a mere innocent victim whose defenses contain insufficient quantities of metaphorical garlic and crucifixes.

Aw, who am I kidding? These small tasks that eat away at my productivity aren't the real problem. If I am to be completely honest with you (and with myself), I'm afraid we all have to admit that the true time-napping culprit is the Colorado Lottery Board. If they weren't so incompetent in their efforts to provide me with the winning Lotto ticket, then time would not be so scarce for me. As long as their ineptitude exists, though, I guess I am forced to mitigate the vampires through additional efforts with time management. I'll get right on that -- as soon as I wake up from my next nap.

Anyway, I hope your weekend was a good one, and that you accomplished everything you wanted to. Let's hope we can all stay productive, and have a great day!