People randomly walk into my office just 'cause. They don't want anything; they're just wandering. The visit is usually preceded by a distant chime of a Mac's startup sound, and it ends a minute or two later.

A couple of weeks ago, I got to see people quite often. I was working on a video, and had commandeered every piece of available hard disk space in anyone's Mac that was connected to my network. This time, it was me wandering around, bumping into the guy working on the project with me quite often, both of us "visiting" everyone else. They didn't mind; our Macs were reading off of their hard drives, and their machines were laughing at them when they tried to move the mouse around. And this was just building previews of what was to be a video.

Then, a couple of days ago, I was downloading some files from an FTP archive that were admitedly rather large, and it got me thinking. My life is controlled by my Mac and whatever it is doing. It seems everyone else's around here is, too. That's probably a good thing, or I'd only see them at staff meetings. I'm not at critical stages yet; I can be away from computers for quite a while and function as a human being just fine, but during the day, while I am working, everything I do depends on whether I get that friendly message or not. "Welcome to Macintosh", it greets me, and it is just as if confirmation that the sun would indeed come out had arrived or something. Apple changed the image next to that message on me in a recent system software update; I was quite lost for a while. It has been 10 years after all... I'm getting used to it, though.

But I digress. With all that available time while I wait for my Mac to finish whatever, you'd think I could catch up on phone calls, drop a note to my friends, reorganize my desk, look at my schedule, etc. Well, I can't. Everything is on my computer somewhere, and most of the time I don't think of getting the info out before I hit the OK button that will separate me from my world. Dynodex holds all the phone numbers, business related or not, like a fortress. Meeting Maker tells me where to be when, and, well, you get the idea. You don't actually think that I memorize people's e-mail addresses, do you? The nicknames file in Eudora handles that, so going to some other computer is right out. I just write to Harry, Matt, whomever, and my Mac knows what to do from there. So much for that.

Thanks to the muses, I still get to sketch, think marketing strategies, and look through photographer's portfolios, all of that unattended by my Mac. Good thing. The problem is that my Mac seems to be way busier more often that I have such things to do. My Newton helps, as it holds some of the same info, but it gets left in inconvenient places all the time. Oh, but that's a computer, too. See what I mean? The only real solution would be to have two Macs on my desk, but then the only real reason to get up and leave my office in the middle of a 15 hour day would be gone. Never mind.

- Anabella Wewer