Sticks and Stones

It started off as yet another day... programming all morning... clients desperately trying to contact me while I was desperately trying to concentrate.

Then comes the phone call:

Monsieur Erb ?

"Yes?"

This is the nurse from the Honoré de Balzac School...

It's about your daughter Jessica

At this point I spend one of those absolutely awful 10 to 15 second pregnant pause periods of all of the worst possibilites know to man (and some heretowith unknown)...

She has hurt her thumb (Whew!) It has swollen quite a bit and she can not move it. I think you should get an x-ray done.

After taking a few deep breaths I tell her I will be right there.

So that's how I spent most of the afternoon. Took a cab, picked her up from school, went to the emergency room of our hospital with a good hands and fingers department (Hôpital de Perpétuel Secour) which (unfortunately) we actually know quite well having been there before for both Jessica and Desney. After an hour filling out papers and waiting on queues we got her x-ray and then waited another hour to see a doctor. The doctor pronounced she had broken her thumb, in 2 places, and then proceeded to wrap her thumb and wrist in a sort of pseudo-cast. It's a special sort of bandage with built-in resin which dries after about 15 minutes. I was quite impressed. We didn't get out of there until about 16:00.

Got home to find out there were at least 2 relatively serious professional emergencies going on: 1 client in London had a laptop which would no longer boot (Unrecognisable hard disk) and another in Switzerland could not connect to the Internet. I solved the Swiss problem with a phone call and a bit of telemaintenance. The laptop however is going to be a challenge as the hard disk is dead but the client had done some work over the weekend which he had not yet backed up and which I need to recover.

To end the day Jessica decided to take a shower in "our" bathroom so as to be near Desney while she was making dinner. Jessica dropped the shower head and broke it. I didn't find out until much later. I was actually surprised by how severely such a minor incident affected me and by the time I went to sleep I was thoroughly pissed off that my shower had been "wounded"...