You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy™
Printer 5.
Sometimes crazy is big. Sometimes crazy is a huge moment, a whirl wind of energy pouring out of the mountains blowing back your hair.
Sometimes crazy is a Matahorn expedition with Sherpas and ice picks and a box of Kool Aid.
But sometimes crazy is nothing like that. Sometimes crazy is tiny. Sometimes it is a grain of sand on the tip of a pin.
Sometimes crazy is almost imperceptible, an element on the periodic chart that school kids only learn by living. Sometimes you need to stop and exhale and study crazy in life’s laboratory with an electron microscope.
This is one of those stories. It’s a story so tiny it makes you say so what, who cares.
This story is smaller and less significant than fuzz on a baby fly’s ass.
This story is so unremarkable, it actually hit me between the eyes and made me laugh out loud.
Nobody outside the I.T. lady has a clue why I’m amused, but trust me, I’m amused.
To me, this story is one of the curious moments that make life more than a long commute to work every day.
This is the kind of story where you have to slow down time to see it.
This is the kind of story, where you need to shoot high-speed film of a humming-bird’s wing just to understand what’s happening.
If you don’t reposition your thoughts, the humming-bird is gone.
But if you slow it down, study its beauty, you see the power generated from tiny wings beating faster than a coo coo clock on fire.
To slow down time, to slow down a moment of singular unimportance tends to isolate that moment and give it a spotlight that demands attention.
It all starts when I try to print a script.
I get an error code. 484 printer function.
WTF
I try again because obviously that must be a mistake.
Nope. Printer error 484.
I email my I.T. lady and tell her the print function has disappeared.
“Mapping issue,” she says like that makes any damn sense to anyone outside the I.T. department.
She comes over the next day and opens up a number of security panels and printer administrator boxes.
Click. Enter. Bang. Whiz.
“There ya go,” she says. “Good as new.”
“Thanks,” I say.
I am working on a story about a dog rescue woman who is arrested for allowing 37 dogs to die in her care. For almost a year she stuffs the dogs remains in big garbage bags and lets them decompose. Why? She tells investigators she didn’t know what else to do?
It’s a terrible story and my adrenaline is racing as I get off the phone with the lead investigator.
“Thanks I’ll be right there,” I say.
I look at my notes from the phone conversation and push print.
I see an icon pop up for a fraction of a second.
Like the humming-bird’s wing beating, it’s too fast, I can’t read it, but it feels different.
But I don’t have to time to place the process under the microscope. I’m late and gotta run.
I run to printer 5.
I see two sheets of paper. They look like my words. I head out the door.
“Where we going?” my camera man says.
“Hold on, I have the address right here,” I say.
I scan down the front of page 1.
I look for the address of the crime scene. I don’t see it.
I pull the 2nd page from behind the 1st page. I look at page two and it’s got some gibberish, stray words and symbols that I must have pushed down the page while typing 120 words a minute without punctuation or concern for grammar.
Just the facts, right?
I scratch my head and go back to the 1st page.
“It’s got to be here,” I say aloud.
I read each sentence I just wrote.
“Yep, these are my notes.”
I look at the very bottom of the page. It says page 1.
I look at the other page in my hand. It says page 3.
“I’m missing the 2nd page,” I say aloud. “Where’s page 2? I must have left it on the printer.”
I call the station and get the address from the assignment desk, never thinking about page 2 again.
Hours go by. I interview investigators and go to the farm where the dogs died. Hours later, I get back to the station and write my story.
I hit print.
I grab 2 pages off printer 5 and head to the audio booth.
I read page one and get to the bottom.
I look at the 2nd page and it’s got some script but I’m missing an entire chunk of the story I need to record.
I look again at page 1. I see all the words I just wrote.
I look at the bottom of this page and see it says Page 1.
I look at the other page in my hand. It says page 3.
“Again?”
This time I am angry as I record myself flustered and crinkling paper.
“Where the hell is page 2?” I say.
I watch the record meter bounce with every syllable, every word, every crunch of the page.
I sit before the microphone and wonder if I left page two on the printer, again.
“Do I have Alzheimer’s,” I exclaim into the microphone.
That’s when I turn page 1 over.
That’s when the humming bird’s wing bashes me in the mind.
I expect to see a snow-white field of blank. Instead I see an entire thesaurus of words.
I scan to the bottom. It says Page 2.
Wow.
Page 2 was hiding on the back of page 1. I never ever thought to turn page 1 over and look for page 2.
Why would I?
18 years of hitting print, I have never had the printer print on both sides.
If there was a page 2, printer 5 printed Page 2 on a 2nd piece of paper behind page 1.
Page 1. Page 2. Two pieces of paper. No big deal. 18 years. It’s always been this way.
Suddenly today, a kink, a curveball, something different.
Page 2 on the back side of page 1? I the scope of things that happen in a day, it’s a single birthday candle on the cake of Methuselah. But it is a moment that I have stopped to celebrate.
I finish tracking the story and walk into the newsroom.
The assignment editor looks at me curiously.
You know that address I couldn’t find earlier today because I left it on the printer?
“Yes,” she says wondering where I am going with this.
“Well I had it the whole time. I’m the village idiot.”
“Huh?”
“It was on the back of page 1 and I just never thought to look for a 2nd page on the back of the 1st page. Isn’t that crazy?”
The assignment editor looks at me like I’m crazy. Just then the police scanner crackles about a motorcycle that has hit the pavement.
This is a big moment in a world filled with big moments.
But to me, the most interesting thing that happened at work is the tiny little nuance of life that I failed to recognize till I slowed down and let it come to me.
I had to look under the flapping wing of a humming bird to see a moment that was worth seeing.
Sometimes life’s best moments are small, discreet, private.
A leaf falls from a tree, rocking on a gentle breeze, landing on a driveway to make up a geometric design in the stone work that looks like a smiling face.
Sometimes life is a bird soaring silently over your head. You only notice it because its shadow intersects your plane of existence. The moment forces you to look up and imagine what it might be like to be that bird simply floating in a blue interminable sky.
What if the bird didn’t fly over your head? What if you didn’t notice the shadow? What if you didn’t look up?
Would you have missed the moment to stare into the deep, endless blue, missing the chance to dream?
Life is sometimes about the small, inconsequential, infinitesimally small moments that make up the cosmic dust of existence.
Someone once said “stop and smell the roses.”
While you’re at it, look the humming bird, flapping madly, really sunbathing in mid-air, stopping to smell the petals on his way to a rainbow.
Life’s Crazy™