BlackMolly: That Used to be MY Lap

The small town I live in was extra quiet last night as I sat in the living room working on my laptop at a steady pace. Molly, my five-year-old toy poodle daughter, sat at my feet and waited for an invitation to my lap. Excuse me, her lap. When I didn't move my computer, she snorted at me, gave herself a good shake and hopped up on the opposite end of the couch. After she saw that it hadn't seemed to phase my typing, she sighed and lay down, resigned.

Shortly after being introduced to the world of technology, my mom gave me a little comic sketch displaying a lady sitting in a chair with a laptop sitting on her lap. At her feet was her dog and cat. The dog was telling the cat, "That used to be my lap."

I used to keep that comic pasted to the monitor of my home desktop system, as a reminder to put the computer and the homework away for an hour or two each day and play with Molly. When I moved back home from college, it got lost somewhere in the shuffle. Come to think about it, that happened to quite a bit of my things from college.

The lure of learning has always been a strong one for me. Amazingly, it's gotten more attractive to me as I get older, too. These days, education goes hand-in-hand with technology and I've fallen into the never-ending circle of learn, go to work, learn, go to work. Even with my photography hobby, I am still sucked into the endless technology training hole and forget to play with Molly. That's not completely accurate. I don't forget to play with her. Instead, I tell both of us that I'm almost finished. Just a couple more tweaks and my project will be perfect. Next thing I know, I've "wasted" the whole evening and it's time for bed. No ball playing for Molly that night.

Sometimes, the pressure to learn more and keep up with an ever changing work environment can be so overwhelming that all I do is study when I get home from work! The whole reason I've got projects outside of work is so I can stay tuned for work. If I think a tool in my toolbox is getting rusty, it comes out and I work on it until I'm sure it's in working order.

All the reasons I should keep going on my work last night flashed through my head. Molly continued watching me, over on the opposite side of the couch from me, and the comic strip popped into my head. That comic was not funny. It's so true that it holds absolutely no humor for me.

I did try to keep going with what I was doing. A few more lines of code, Molly, just a few more. I promise.

A guilty conscience always nags at a person, though, and I found myself thinking about a Star Trek episode I'd watched just a few days earlier, instead of working on my project as I sat there. A man tried to help his people by manipulating time through calculations. His first attempt went wonderfully, but his second attempt wiped out a colony where his family lived. Over time, he destroyed several nations, trying to reverse what he'd done, but he was always one more calculation from bringing them back. He also had had haunting memories of his wife inviting him for walks or asking him to spend time with his family. He always replied that he only had a few more calculations to do and then he'd spend time with them. He promised. Was I doing that to Molly?

It's absolutely amazing how fast the brain feeds all these images and how perfectly guilt works on you when your daughter sits and stares at you, then looks at your computer, then back at you. The picture of that dog talking to the cat kept nagging at me. I was doing that to Molly, only she was telling other dogs about it.

I think the whole self-guilt trip took a whopping ninety seconds before I firmly told myself to stop working on my project. It could wait until tomorrow. Molly couldn't. So I shut down the computer, put it away, and invited her to come reclaim her lap.

Perhaps I should root around a bit and find that comic so I don't do that to Molly again. I will need to make copies of it and put one on my server, one on my graphix computer, one on the family computer, one on my laptop, one on my work computer… No wonder she's so upset with me!