The postman didn’t call today.
My work involves a number of pieces of printed music being delivered to me each month, I subscribe to a couple of magazines and I’ve recently been selling lots of CDs on Ebay, and have been receiving several cheques. So the non-appearance of the postman is unusual, but not unheard of.
Far more alarming, though, is the total lack of email. As usual, I turned the computer on around 9:00, opened up my mail client and checked for new mail. Nothing. It’s now 11:20 and I just checked again, in case there had been a server problem the first time. Nothing. I even logged into my mail server via the web interface, just in case something was preventing the messages from being downloaded. Nothing.
Why am I even mentioning this? I’m not expecting anything important, and it’s a pleasant surprise not to see the usual 10-15 items of nightly Viagra/Penis/Mortgage spam coming down the wire. I guess it just shows how any routine, no matter how dreary or mundane, can act as a comfort of sorts; a “normality index”. I’m glad to have the kind of psychological stability which allows me to realise that not all types of abnormality are bad. I shall celebrate by using my untainted bandwidth to download some more Frank Zappa bootlegs…