Every year, on the Ides of March, I spend twenty-four hours away from computers. No, I mean it…every other day of the year, whether on vacation, at home, on the road, or wherever, I do something on a computer…except for the Ides of March. I avoid touching a computer on this one day every year.

And every year, it’s a little strange. I’ll reach without thinking for the Handspring Visor, my constant companion for a few years now, and just before grasping it will rip my hand away. I’ll want to change radio stations, and suddenly realize that I’m listening to an Internet broadcast, and like a baby helplessly cry for mommy (or my wife) to change the station. I’ll receive a bill in the mail and start walking toward my office to write the check, and then realize that the checkbook is on the computer, checks in the printer.

And then I start to…go through withdrawal. Like breathing, typing on a keyboard to connect to the rest of the world is something done without conscious thought. It isn’t something I want, it just is. By nine or ten o’clock in the evening, I’m starting to pace, wondering how the rest of the world has gotten along without me.

I have perfected some tricks over the years to make it appear it’s just any other day. The mailing list server continues to function, although mail sent directly to me isn’t answered until the sixteenth. Even this blog post appears to be posted on the morning of the 15th, when it’s in fact being written very early on the 14th.

On the Internet, on this one day, I am a shadow…apparently here, but really lying on a couch reading a book, turning paper pages. I seem to be working on making certain the OTR Digest and other mailing lists are released, when I’m really watching an episode of Star Trek on laserdisc (no, not DVD, the big 12″ things that have joined the 16″ transcription disc and the eight-track tape in obsolescence). While I appear to be engaged with the happenings in the world, I’m really drinking kaluha over ice at ten in the morning.

By the evening, I’m starting to worry. Has the server crashed? How would I know? What’s happening in the world? What have I missed?

At midnight the morning of the sixteenth, I lunge for the keyboard, prepared to handle the problems and crises I know are there, only to find that everything’s fine. The world has gone on just perfectly without my hands on the controls. And I start to wonder…the other three hundred and sixty-some days a year…do I really do anything then?