DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

When I was in high school, I volunteered at a local hospital during our Senior Service project. I spent two weeks pushing metal gurneys down long carpeted hallways, and nearly electrocuting myself when I reached for the elevator button. Very quickly I understood why the wallpaper surrounding the buttons was always rubbed bare — it was not due, as I’d previously concluded, to the poor aim of spastic patients, but to the methodical rubbing by the staff to rid their bodies of latent static electrical charges. For years, I subconsciously rubbed my hand on the wall before touching an elevator button.

Today I was proofreading a scholarly paper and a mental alarm went off when I saw a paragraph begin with the word “From.” Anyone who has been online as long as I have, or who has written as many emails, may realize the cause of the alarm: email clients of yore, or perhaps email servers of yore, would prefix the word “From” with “>” at the beginning of a line, to distinguish it from the email header “From: “. Being somewhat pedantic in my insistance that software programs do not modify my emails, I learned over time to never begin a line with the word “From”.

A quick test of my current mailer indicates that it no longer adds the “>” character. But I wonder if this conditioned response will ever end. Think how much more efficient I could be if I could convert all the bits of my brain that worry about wall-rubbing near elevators and sentence-construction when the word “From” falls near the beginning of a line into productive pursuits. Maybe, for example, I’d one day finish this damn journal software.