Strange memory…

dan’s laptop in his truck.

My back has been out for a week. It might be the medication I’m on, but I had a thought that actually made me giggle.

I use to work for this woman. We shall call her ‘nut job’.  She had the best legal secretary working for her at the time, but it wouldn’t be long before she was leaving to take the bar and needed a replacement.
I ended up becoming her replacement.
When she gave me all the instructions, she would make a point of letting me know the ‘really’ important things I had to remember by doing this ‘she’s a nut-job’ eye roll.  The majority of my job consisted of answering the phone, logging the time I was on the phone, putting together the cases, filing out people’s divorce papers, filing the papers, issuing the papers, hiring the detectives (yes, people would go that far) and basically doing everything, but go to court to plead the case.

My boss had some strange requirements of me, but the ones I found most amusing were the computer related ones.
“Kristine, I need you to change the icons on the computer.”  She didn’t like certain icons because they ‘freaked her out’.  Like most people, she didn’t like the paper clip that would come out and try to help her. She was certain it was evil and she would ‘pay me extra’ if I could make him go away and never come back!

One morning I came into work and she met me in my office, looking very serious.  “Go in the conference room, we need to talk privately.”  There was no one in either one of our offices, but she seemed serious so I followed her.
In a whisper she said, “I need you to go into my office and very carefully turn on my computer. It wants the password, you know what it is.  Enter it and when everything comes up, let me know…but whisper to me when you’re ready for me to come back.”

I took note of the distress on her face and it made me wonder if some disgruntled ex-husband had rigged her computer to explode if she started it up.

Her computer was already on, but she shook her head violently and gave me the hand movements to restart it. I did and the password cue came up. I looked at her for permission and she shook her head to enter it.  After I entered the password and everything started opening she whispered, ‘Open Office Word’.  I did so and the document she was working on popped open.
She crept up to the desk and asked me to slowly move my hands and she placed her hands where mine once were.
“Thank you.”
“Sure.”

That not being one of the crazier things she has asked me to do, I didn’t even question it.  She came out about an hour later and said, “Shit, it’s on to me! can you come back in here for a minute and do me a favor?”  I got up from my desk and made my way back to her and she asked me to start typing what she was saying.   After I finished it and hit the save button, she shared her problem with me.
“You see, this computer it knows when I am using it and it won’t work right. It only works when you or the other secretary start with it.  It’s because it knows the pressure of the keyboard when I use it.  Sometimes I just have to trick it into not knowing it’s me that using it.”

When I left her office to work for the court house, I didn’t have the opportunity to talk to the person replacing me. I did have to call a few times about some papers that were filed by her office and when I did, the poor guy sounded like he too had lost his mind.
She went out of business within a year of me leaving the office.  She probably just left the computer there.

It WAS out to get her, you know.