Cognitive Quit Smoking

ABC’s
Today was one of those that starts lousy and goes steadily downhill. Although I
don’t actively do ABC’s any more I thought hey, why not pick one and do an ABC
around it.
The events:-
1) Fixed penalty fine from Lancs Police for being caught speeding. Fair cop?
No way - doing 36mph in a 30mph zone has got to be the pettiest fine of all.
They allow a 10% error margin and I’m one - yes one - percent outside that. £40
lighter..
2.. The long awaited Broadband is installed. High speed internet at last. No
end of problems getting it configured. Engineer installs the modem on my pc -
and gawd knows what he does but email and internet explorer promptly crash.
Wonderful - the day is getting even better. Run Scandisk, system restore, and
finally reinstall I.E.
3.. In the middle of all this there’s a power cut, the burglar alarm trips off

and wakes up the neighbourhood. Engineer by now is getting very bored, his
mobile phone keeps ringing - boss demanding to know why all this is taking so
long. Offer to make him a coffee - oops, no electricity, forget that one…
4.. Power supply returns - oh goody - but the high speed internet is on a go
slow and won’t work. He rings for assistance. No doubt it will take several
engineers standing round drinking coffee, going ‘ummmm’ before we make a bit of
progress. Bit like that maths problem at school ‘If it takes 3 men seven hours
to dig a hole measuring 1000 cubic feet, how long will it take 7 men to dig the
same size hole?’ take it from me, 7 are as useless as 3.. And the broadband will
have to wait for another day.
The ABC? Oh yes. But I’m too tired now to set it down.. but all those events
generated the same emotions - anger, irritability, frustration. Which triggered
the same physical sensations at each event - the churning stomach, the knotted
up muscles in the neck and shoulders, a general physical antsiness and shallow
breathing. I didn’t have to consciously take those deep breaths that did calm me
down, or deal with all that internal arguing while Warren offered me a smoke
‘because that will make you feel better’. I knew absolutely that a cig would do
absolutely nothing to resolve any of the chaos going on around me, because those
old associations between ‘any uncomfortable’ and the ‘relief’ from a smoke were
refuted a long time ago. Walking away from the situation just for a few minutes
helped me get some focus back to my thinking.
And thank goodness for an ancient trusty pc, and dial up, to keep me connected
to the Net..
Pam

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 30th, 2004 at 5:11 pm and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.