Out?Look!

Is my little secret out of the bag? Maybe.

My entire office got new computers this week. Sweet little laptops stocked with all kinds of gadgets and tools like the new Microsoft Office Suite 2007, which, if you haven’t seen it, looks different enough from previous versions to cause panic in colleagues that are resistant to change.

To avoid that panic, my boss asked if I would do a quick training on the basics yesterday afternoon. Not like I’m an expert, but since my old laptop was making noises like a sick Chevy Nova when I would try to start it, I got my new computer first and had been playing with it all weekend.

So, in walks me to a conference room full of co-workers, plug my laptop into the LCD projector and promise to guide them through the promised land of Microsoft bliss. Word – no problem. The new Excel – I may have even heard some oohs and ahhs. Outlook – ah here’s the rub.

How could I forget that while items and events marked “private” won’t show up on shared calendars and folders, they will appear when you yourself are viewing your personal ones? Never mind that my personal ones were projected on to the wall in my boss’s office. How was Microsoft to know?

So, there we were reviewing calendar settings and how to move things here and there when I realize that on the wall for the world to see is this calendar entry: “HSG. 7 am. _______ Hospital.”

Sh*t.

I am hoping that my co-workers were so overwhelmed by their new toys and how to work them that they didn’t register that one event out of so many others. I am hoping that HSG is cryptic enough that the colleagues that don’t know about this little adventure (almost all of them) still won’t. I could be overreacting. It could be that folks weren’t even looking at the wall. Perhaps their noses were buried in their keypads and settings. At any rate, I’m an idiot.

If that weren’t bad enough, as we’re still in Outlook, a new email from a friend pops up in my inbox. Subject? Yesterday’s NY Times article about the rising price for egg donors and coinciding ethical concerns.

We’ll talk about that later.