Every so often, I’ll be doing an ultrasound exam of an elderly person who is lying on the cot trying to breathe through their back pain. They utter the unwelcome words, “I need to use the bathroom. Are you almost done?” This is my sign that I’d better hurry before the patient either asks for a bedside urinal or has an accident on the cot.
Inevitably at tense moments like these, the Windows-based ultrasound machine crashes. I barely have time to finish the test before the patient’s bladder explodes, and now I have to restart the whole machine. Then I hope that the thing I was going to image is easy to find again and isn’t lost forever in a mound of flesh.
The comic relief in situations like these is that the machine, while it reboots, emanates all sorts of sparkly, upbeat beeps and little ditties, oblivious to the fact that it has thrown a wrench in the exam.
Mother Nature plays the same coy tricks. She will hurl ice onto a forest for hours, cracking the trees’ branches all night like a war zone. The power will go out, the well is out, but the next day the sun shines brightly across a blindingly blue sky. It’s like Ma Nature started a bar fight, but the next day she can’t recall any of the chaos she caused. “Who? Lil ‘ol me? Why I don’t know WHAT you’re talking about.”
This just happened again today as we received enough rain for fish to wash up on the streets and for roads to cave in. Many people are dealing with leaking roofs and flooded basements. Yet a few hours later, the sun shone in a cobalt blue sky full of popcorn clouds. No wonder colorful personalities were attributed to the Greek gods. Mother Nature destroys wantonly and then puts on a magnificent display to try to make us forget how she wreaked such havoc. Just like a Windows operating system.
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