It was still quite dark out when I could have sworn I heard my alarm clock go off. I reached for the snooze button, only to realize it wasn't the clock making such an insistent fuss -- it was the phone. I grabbed the handset and shoved it between my ear and the pillow so I didn't have to assume any position with the slightest semblance of verticality. I mumbled something unintelligible, and the caller responded, apparently, quite oblivious to the fact that some people just might be in bed at that hour.

"Hello, Kahlee? Are you coming in today?" Even in the last vestiges of REM sleep , I was conscious enough to recognize that the discordant voice in my ear was one of the secretaries in our L.A. office. "Yeah, Janie. What's up? Is there a problem?" "Well, I was just wondering how to get the dirt stains out of my mouse pad. But I guess it can wait until you get in." She hung up and the phone went silent. I squinted in the direction of the alarm clock: 6:25 a.m. Much too early in the day to seriously contemplate murder over a muddied mouse pad.

And with that, I snuggled back beneath the quilt, hoping desperately to finish the idyllic, sailing-into-the-Tahitian-sunset dream I'd begun before beauty sleepus interruptus. No luck. In this version, computers, not coconuts, lurked under every palm tree, and hoards of error-message besieged natives were obviously restless, unwilling to reboot. After a half-hour of tossing around in the flannel surf on my rather cumbersome Posture-pedic raft, I voted myself off the island and decided to get up and head for the office.

While brushing my teeth, I caught an eerie, sleep-deprived glimpse of my future in the mirror. It was an average Friday night in the year 2025. I was staring into the same mirror, but this time, I was combing the last few strands of my thinning blue hair into a tidy little bun while my teeth soaked in a jar on the counter. My wrist pager went off, letting me know that the microwave had finished heating my mug of cappuccino-flavored Ensure to the precise temperature of molten lead. I tossed on a plaid, Wal-Mart housecoat and some terry-cloth slippers, then trundled into the kitchen to retrieve the still-bubbling beverage on my way to the computer.

Waiting for my virtual Mahjong game to come up on the Pentium 37 I'd built some years earlier, I proudly perused the old technical certifications that still graced my walls. Then, as the plaintive strains of Connie Francis singing, "Who's Sorry Now?" wafted through an open window, I sipped my steaming brew and resigned myself to yet another weekend with my 17 rescued cats and a yappy little dog named "Bobo" for companionship.

Yikes! I shuddered as I blinked myself back to present day. If that foggy vision was indeed a rather Dickens-like portent of things to come, then something had to change. I certainly was not going to spend my final days on earth contemplating a 75" flat-screen monitor and a closet full of muu-muus. Or wonder if I could have become another Gauguin if I'd only taken time away from the fast-paced pressures of the tech world to travel to Tahiti and paint that beautiful sunset.

On the drive into town, I started focusing on better ways to separate my intense desire to solve all of the world's problems from my actual help desk and training responsibilities. Just then, a voice not unlike C.B. de Mille's in The Ten Commandments spoke to me from out of the L.A. smog: "Go forth and get a life. Leave the stress and demands of your job at the office each day, and don't look back lest you be turned into a pillar of silica."

Arriving at my desk, I looked at my surroundings for ways to provide a more tranquil working environment. I briefly considered applying the ancient Chinese principles of Feng Shui to my cubicle. But I barely had room for my PC, books and other materials, let alone a properly positioned porcelain fountain filled with sacred rocks from the Yangtze River. And besides, where would I hang the wind chime?

Throughout the day, I pondered other possibilities for reducing stress, ranging from the Shakespeare inspired, "First, we kill all the users," to the modern Emersonian, "Peace cannot be achieved through violence, it can only be attained through Prozac." But I needed a strategy for balancing my life that was more pragmatic than slaughterous or pharmaceutical. That night, I wrote a series of "Get A Life" goals for myself:

• First, I will not linger, loiter or otherwise lounge around the office after hours catching up on loose ends. Some ends will always be loose, and attempting to tie them up will only leave me fit to be tied.
• Second, I will take lunch every day and leave the premises to do so. Eating my PB&J sandwich in the kitchen might be perceived by some as the perfect opportunity to query me on how to enforce referential integrity in a database, and I do not fancy an expletive SQL statement stuck to the roof of my mouth.
• Third, if I'm on vacation, out sick or otherwise not on call, I will not check my phone or e-mail every two minutes for messages, or worse, casually call the office to see what's happening. Inevitably, this is when someone will have to mention the flood in the server room.
• Fourth, I accept that I will never know all the answers to life's technical questions. Whenever I feel like a stranger in a strange LAN, I will take a deep breath and follow the sage advice of SNL's New Age pseudo-shrink, Stuart Smalley, by telling myself: "That's okay, because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, users like me."
• Fifth, no matter how I try to convince others that upgrading the firm's software or hardware would vastly improve efficiency and save money in the long run, there will always be those who refuse to see past their dictaphones. Tempting though it might be, I will not flog them into submission with my foam rubber wrist rest. Instead, I will remember the words of Bill's lesser known cousin, Abraham Gates: "You can please some of the attorneys all of the time and all of the attorneys some of the time, but you won't get anything past the management committee if it costs over 25 bucks." Last, and most important, I will remember to laugh early and laugh often. What better way to stave off the occasional urge to take a long drive off a short peer-to-peer network configuration.

I printed out my list and pasted it to the bathroom mirror. In the months that have followed my dawn's early enlightenment, I've done my best to stick to these principles. I'm not always successful, but overall, I'm much more relaxed both on the job and off. I no longer wake up in a cold sweat, wondering if I remembered to put in the backup tape. Amazingly enough, I've even found time to pursue painting and other pleasures. I see a different future now. If there's a muu-muu in it, that's only because I'm wearing one for UV protection as I luxuriate somewhere on a tropical island beach, sipping a MaiTai while the surf gently rolls in.

Copyright 2001, Kahlee Brighton c/o thelastword@earthlink.net. All rights reserved. Printed here with permission.