Lessons from my windows

A couple of weeks ago I was experiencing computer problems at work. The unit would shut down suddenly, or take forever to respond to the simplest commands. You know the drill. It's as frustrating as listening to a dripping downstairs faucet as the night creeps toward dawn.

The reset button on my computer tends to be my go-to device. Can't get the browser to respond? Hit the reset button. Files running inordinately slow? Hit the reset button. Getting a strange and repetitive error message? I hit the reset button.

But this time, hitting the reset button did nothing. Finally a techhie came in and spent about four hours one morning at my desk, scanning for viruses and looking for major malware infestations. When I came back to my desk in the afternoon, I found him wrapping up the session.

"What was the problem?" I asked him.

He slowly swiveled my chair around and examined me.

"When's the last time you emptied your trash?" he asked me.

I stared at him, stupefied. Because I couldn't remember, I said, "What do you mean?"

"You had 3 gigs of trash in your trashcan," he answered. "It tends to slow things down."

"But what about the viruses? The malware?" I sought to find some respectable reason for having taken up four hours of his time.

"Just trash," he answered. And smiled. And walked off.

Sometimes I feel like I've spent days trying to climb away from or out of the shadow of negativity, often through my own mistakes. Last week was one of those weeks. Nothing seemed to go right at work, and I spent way too much time trying to fix or mitigate problems. In fact, many of the problems seemed to haunt me day in and day out, coming back just when I thought they were gone. I think that for most of us this experience is pretty typical.

Like my computer, I, too, have a reset button. But it fails to work, sometimes, too. But it occurs to me now that in the future, if the reset button fails, I should try emptying the trash.