Off button

A friend of mine recently posted about how her four year old is driving her nuts with all of his questions, especially since most of the time he knows the answer. My son does that too. But I have to say what's more annoying is his endless making sense of everything. The other day I was trying to figure out how to use the new calling card I just bought so I could finally call my friend Miriam in Israel and my son was just piping away about the inner workings of my scanner. It went something like this:

Mommy, scanners are really good for sending pictures to grandma because you can open the lid, put the picture in it, press the button and listen for the scanning noises, whooszh, whooszh, and then the picture comes on the computer so you can put it in an email and send it Grandma! And then if I want to send another picture I just open the lid again and take out the first picture and put in another one, maybe of a frog or something like that, and then I do the whole thing again. Or maybe a rainbow or a triangle. But sometimes it's better if we print pictures, right mommy? Because then I just have to press the button so it turns orange and then you can press print when you click the mouse and then you put the paper in that I can't touch even though I really like paper but you say my hands are dirty but I just washed them and then I press the button again so the paper goes in and then the inks go! And they make the colors! Like the rainbow! Is it better to scan or to print mommy? I like printing better because then we can see the rainbow colors unless the printer needs more ink and then I have to open it for you and see the blinking light on the inks and take one out and you have to unwrap the new one and I put it in and then we close the lid again! And then I push the off button. We're really good at printing and scanning, right mommy? I love you mommy.

I wish it was as simple as pushing the off button. I had to finally walk away from the computer because I felt a brain hemorrhage coming on.

Retraction

I stand corrected. Our creative director does in fact know his Yiddish sayings. I just have a hearing problem. The phrase is "Off the Schneid" and it comes from baseball via the shtetl to mean the end of a losing streak. Schneid, meaning cloth. Cutting the cloth.
You learn something new everyday. Back to work.

Off the Schein

I tell you I am so easily distracted. It's like a disease. I'm constantly checking my email, browsing around the Internet. The damned Internet. Sure I was happy to have it yesterday when our creative director at Shutterfly kept saying, "he needs to just get off the shein" and we all wondered what the hell a schein was so I googled it and it turns out to mean "beautiful" in Yiddish. This, of course, makes no sense in the context of the conversation but given that the creative director is actually not Jewish but likes to throw around Jewish expressions because he thinks it gives him more cache, I am not surprised.

Where was I?

Yes, distracted. In general the Internet is my demise. This is actually the thing that I'm working on with my life coach (I have a life coach). She says it's like a muscle that's clearly atrophied in my case. So I decided that when I'm distracted at my day job I'll either just push through it and actually do my work. Or, like right now, I'll blog (ie. get all the clutter out of my brain) for five minutes and then get back to work. Guess which scenario is more likely.

What did we do before the Internet? A whole lot of nothing I guess. Or maybe we talked to each other and wasted time that way.