Thursday, May 3, 2012

Briefcase Bumming

Thursday May 3rd, 2012 – Fox Lake, IL

   I’m really bummed out about losing my briefcase, or at least the booking calendar in it. What a helpless feeling it is to not be able to retrace my steps and get it back – especially when I thought I was being smart by having it with me for the meeting I had last week. It’s gone, and I doubt I’ll ever see it again. It’s not worth anything to anyone else but me, and that’s why it’s so frustrating.

   It probably got snagged in those scant few minutes I left the car alone to take a squirt at the gas station. Should I have parked the car, shut the engine off and locked it for a two minute tinkle? In a perfect world, maybe I should have. But in a perfect world, nobody would be stealing from me.

   If it didn’t happen at the gas station, there are only a few other possibilities. I stopped for a late lunch at the Iron Skillet on Highway 20 in Racine, WI with Gary Pansch and Russ Martin on my way home, but I parked right outside the restaurant and could plainly see my car the whole time.

   I went to Marc Schultz’s house that night to watch the NFL draft, but he lives in an extremely safe neighborhood. I locked my doors anyway, but didn’t look to see if the briefcase was still in the back seat as I’d had no use for it all day since the meeting in Madison. Who’d think of that?

   I didn’t think of it until yesterday, when I needed my calendar to start sending out emails to get started trying to find bookings for the summer and hopefully fall. The first of any new month is a popular time to do that, and I’d needed to work on my bookings for a while. I’ve gotten behind.

   I’d taken a lot of time to hand write probably three or four hundred physical phone numbers on that calendar, with the intention of transferring them back to both a computer file and printed out version to have as a backup in case anything like this ever happened again – which it totally did.

   It’s just a matter of unbelievably horrific timing that it happened on the ONE day I happened to leave myself vulnerable to this. I rarely if ever let that calendar leave the house, and I usually like to have a backup that I can take with me in the car and on the road in case some work comes in.

   If I had myself safely backed up 99 times out of 100 or even 999 times out of 1000, this turned out to be the exception. I can’t count all the times that’s happened, and it’s maddening. I haven’t met anyone else who has had more examples of this, and quite frankly I’m getting very sick of it.

   There’s nothing I can do about it now except complain. The last time I was in this kind of spot, it was my cell phone crapping out and losing all my numbers and contact info. I vowed I’d never let it happen again, so I pieced as many contacts back together as I could, and now this happens.

   Plus, my entire schedule was on that calendar too. Gigs, classes, social events - everything that I had booked so far for the rest of the year was listed in detail. I probably should find a way to do it online too, but I just don’t have time to do all that. I’m old school, and writing it is satisfactory.

   Apparently, that’s not enough. I’ll have to find a way to do it so I’m backed up no matter what random dart from the fates happens to fall out of the sky on a particular day. I hope the scumbag who snagged my briefcase is happy knowing it caused a lot of unneeded aggravation and chaos.

Posted via email from Dobie Maxwell's "Dented Can" Diary

1 comment:

Princess RuRu said...

I can relate. I have been lucky so far but I don't back anything up. I do this however - I write ALL of my events on my blog and i can rely on that to be there for me. You can have an on line privatized section that only you can see and that will save you time. You can print out a hard copy ... Facebook helps me and is like my personal assistant too. I have very little printed out on paper, maybe I should ... and if my laptop is stolen i'd be pretty upset. Considering it never leaves my site.