miscellaneous, etc.

After the third straight day of rain, I start to have trouble working. Everytime, the first two days are no problem and then on the third, all I want to do is watch TV or play Nintendo. Today I managed to blow most of my afternoon cleaning out my address book.

Plaxo is one of these corporate networking applications. It’s like MySpace for the up-tight, type-A personality. In my line of work I meet a lot of these people and all of the business card swapping inevitably leads to address book bloat and the need to cull dead e-mail addresses. In this space, Plaxo really shines.

Here’s the rub: I don’t collect business cards. I smile and swap them with the interested party but I typically forget them in my pants or jacket and, eventually, they are reduced to a dry and crumbling lint ball in the filter of the clothes dryer. On the off chance they make it to my desk, after a couple of weeks I’m picking up the card and find myself saying something like “Corporate Rolfer? What the fuck is that?” and then tossing it in the bin. When I ran Plaxo, it wanted to delete old friends.

That’s probably exagerating because if we were friends, I’d have a good e-mail address and not this abandoned one, an address with nothing left to give except cryptic bounce-messages with 21st century riddles like “Account no longer receiving mail” or “User could not be found on this system”. As usual, I made another tired resolution to keep in touch better and fought back the nostalgia. To my credit, we’re talking maybe five addresses out of a hundred or so, but it still makes me uneasy. “Am I the same person,” I wonder to myself, “or have I turned into a huge douchebag?”

I may never know the one, true, answer. For now, I’m blaming the weather.