Wringer

My phone started ringing this morning before I put my backpack down and hooked up my computer. We had a system down and people were not happy. At one time my pager was going off and both my desk and cell phones were ringing simultaneously. I let them ring and went for coffee.
There’s just so much you can do. Even computers as fast as they are, can only do one instruction at a time….now granted they do that one thing really, really fast, but only one thing at a time. I took a deep breath checked my voicemail and began working on the most important thing on my plate. That’s all you can do.

By this evening, I felt like I had been through an old fashioned Maytag ringer. My mom once had one of those old Maytag washers on the back porch. She had a solar dryer back then. It consisted of a long piece of wire strung from two trees in our back yard. But that old Maytag washer was indestructible. I’ve put army men, sling shots, and assorted other toys through those old wringers and it never even groaned. I almost put a frog through it once but got busted by Mom when she stepped out on the porch to throw a pan full of corn out to the chickens. “You put a living creature through there and I’ll whip you with a rose bush,” she warned. Now you talk about a visual that will send a chill through a kid, but that one did and it invariably made me straighten up and fly right.

But I imagine that had I gotten that frog through that wringer, he would have felt much like I feel like this evening.