I, Borg

I endured the better part of this afternoon inundated by technology whilst battling one of the many demons of Microsoft mail services. The server at my fingertips was fifteen miles away. I connected to my Blackberry with a Bluetooth earpiece and spoke to tech support in Texas and then....India? I never found out. After I gave up my vital statistics and was put in the queue, I waited nearly two hours without connecting to a technician.

But that turned out to be a good thing. The same ghastly loop of bad jazz that sounded as if it were coming straight out of Satan's bottom repeated over and over on the music-on-hold -- between the occasional assurance that my call would be answered in the order received -- until some primal survival instinct took over to keep me sane.

I entered a state of complete clarity as if both hemispheres of my brain had synchronized to a common cause. Every thought wave resonated with the goal of tearing apart my problem until I had a solution so I could end the call and make the ruthlessly tortuous music stop.

It worked. Within a few minutes I formulated what had to be done, implemented the solution, rebooted the server, and confirmed functionality. Uncanny. I wouldn't be surprised if the Bad Jazz on Hold had been carefully chosen to encourage people to either give up waiting or trigger their critical thinking into overdrive.

Brilliance or happenstance? I hope the opportunity for a repeat experiment is indefinitely postponed.