Hire A Private Jet or Just Throw Yourself Out The Window

It’s a cold and rainy day. I’m holed up in my office, drafting a collateral assignment of real estate notes pertaining to well, gas stations. There are three separate projects and a billion different notes and credit agreements and deeds of trust that I’m trying to piece together in some semblance of order. Oh wait, I’m sorry, I’m boring myself here. Let’s start again.

It’s a cold, drizzling Wednesday in January. A young-ish lawyer hunches over her desk, twisting her hair in a ponytail as she stares at the mounds of paperwork that she is meant to parse down into three succinct and well-drafted paragraphs. In two hours. She looks at the three cups already littering her desk and wonders if she has time to get more coffee. She checks her email and sees this:

Hire a private Jet, Hit the Hamptons, Santa Barbara, Sundance and Palm Beach.

She looks out the window and imagines herself on a beach in Santa Barbara, a mango margarita in her hand. She looks back at her desk and slams her head down onto the keyboard, once, twice, three times. Her boss, a hulking man so pale that she can see the veins running across his forehead, walks by but doesn’t stop. She stands and backs up to the doorway, then takes a running leap towards her 11th story floor-to-ceiling window, the one that she thought was so uplifting when she first moved into her office. Out she falls, into the gray, into the air, into nothingness.

And scene.

Random right? So the other day I’m sitting in my office. And I get this email from Jetsetter, a budget travel company that I signed up with back when my husband and I were childless and we actually went places on the spur of the moment. Why I still get these emails, I don’t know, because really they are just a cruel reminder that no, I will not be dashing off to Mexico or Jackson Hole for the weekend. I usually barely notice them. But this one, yesterday, came on a particularly dreary January day, during a particularly dreary work assignment. And really? Hire a private jet? That’s a little over the top even for Jetsetter.

And then I saw the “suggestion” website at the top of my google mail. Anyone ever notice this? I assume the program “reads” your emails, and pulls certain words out and then makes suggestions for websites that you might find helpful.

But this suggestion? It was for suicide clean-up help. What the what? So I clicked on the site. It’s actually a very respectful and helpful company that comes and does the cleaning for you after a particularly tragic event, such as murder or suicide. (By the way, did you know that police do not clean up the scene? They just leave the blood and mess for the ones left behind.) So this is a quite helpful website, but one that hopefully none of us will ever need.

But what exactly in my emails led me to this site? I am wondering if my computer is trying to kill me. Has Stephen King written a story about a computer that drives its owner to suicide? Because you notice that my computer didn’t recommend a suicide hotline or anything. No, it went straight to suicide clean up. Like I don’t even have a chance. I mean, I hate my job and all, but seriously?

Oh and don’t worry, I’m not about to jump out of my office window. But I am going to keep an eye on the computer from now on…