I am regularly gobsmacked by being told of things I have said, things which I don’t remember, and some of which I’m pretty sure I didn’t say because I don’t use that particular phrase or other. The picture those remembrances, accurate or not, paint of me is rather awful, I think, and I am happy I remember myself, accurately or not, otherwise. 

Memory is such a bitch. Every time we recall something we distort it, and others’ minds do the same. When we compare notes, our stories are drastically different. 

It’s really a hardware problem. The standard hard drive when I was created was pretty small and while capable of amazing things, just didn’t have a lot of storage. So stuff may be written on it, but it’s pretty hard and cumbersome to recover, and there is no defragging option. I loved to defrag my hard drives back in the day—it was like a spring cleaning. 

Sometimes the hard drive loses the directions to find the data while it’s still looking for it. Like when I forget why I began to stand up before I’ve finished standing. This may be annoying but it’s not expensive. Usually! 

When my husband was on his way to the post office, I asked if he was stopping at the store after mailing his package, to pick up a couple of things. Then I surreptitiously added a few more things to the list: onions, potatoes, all next week’s groceries—and, importantly, refills for the fluffy duster. 

Of course the store didn’t have refills, only the full kits, which include handles we don’t need, having in the past gotten suckered into buying full kits when refills weren’t available. Which, gee, seems to be every time! 

Back to the internet where I can find some that are “just” refills. OK, good; here they are. Ready to check out. Click “Go to cart” on the website. 

 Cart total $734.67? What the fudge.

At least this time I paid attention to the total at checkout; I have at other times blithely breezed through barely glancing at the cost. Thank heavens I noticed now!

But is this an error on their site? Or, dum de dum dum, have I stumbled onto one of those dastardly plots to steal and sell children:

“Quick, Watson...to the internet! We must post this immediately!”
“But Sherlock, shouldn’t we contact Scotland Yard?”
“No time for the police, Watson! This must be Moriarty...Scotland Yard can never catch him. We need to crowdsource this to people who do their own research!
“The game’s afoot!”

But wait—wasn’t the cost of the cabinet (that sent a woman onto the internet to declare Wayfair was sex-trafficking children) somewhere in the twenty-thousands? This would have to be a particularly unpleasant child to be so cheap! 

Of course it wasn’t the hardware store making this absurd error. 

It was I. I who had stuck a bunch of stuff into the cart on previous online visits, and of course had forgotten. Seven hundred feet of wooden garden path I might someday buy to complete that project I was thinking of trying: to make paths into our woods, which are so unruly that its brambles stole a hat from my head in the spring and didn’t return it till the fall. 

Like that’s really going to happen.