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Hi. How has your week been? Not too stressful, I hope.

Mine has been quite over the top. Some of my "customers" are very high stress and they find it easiest to put some of that stress directly upon my head. Some rightfully so, some I've been told, not so much. Or more precisely, not at all. We work in Internet Technologies, on the web sites of a sizeable Health Insurance company. When dealing with making changes in anything that is at all governed by Federal laws (HIPAA for one), its never much fun. Not to mention, time constraints, doing expensive work cheaply (sorry, inexpensively) and well, I'm sure you understand.

Just how stressful HAS this week been? Or last week for that matter, with this one giving it a good run for the money? How so? How can I explain? How can I draw this out and yet keep talking to you till you realize this was just another attempt to talk about strange and unusual times from the past? How can I even keep your attention for that long? Let's see.

Let's say, this week has been slightly more stressful than I remember feeling one day years ago, while plummeting to the ground from about 3,000 feet up, having just foolishly let go of a perfectly good airplane, one fine summer day. It was about just then that I had noticed my parachute was kind of open above me but had not quite opened as I had been lead to expect it would. I never should have flirted with the beautiful jump master as it was after all, her husband who packed our chutes.

Its funny I should mention not feeling the chute inflating above me and thus slowing my descent, because really, I could not actually see it at all. The risers connecting me to the canopy were crossed against the back of my neck and so I could only therefore stare at my chest, where lay my chin just above where the emergency chute sat all nice and tightly secured to me and ready for instant deployment; oh, and of course that hard ground far beneath and beyond the chute on my chest, with its great grouping of fenced off meadowland that was currently floating gently up toward me at about 100 miles an hour.

It was all quite hard to miss, but what I missed most was seeing what the chute above my head was doing because, frankly, I just wasn't slowing down. I began to consider feeling stressed out, but I had been told you only have about ten seconds to make a decision on what to do in a situation like that and at that altitude, so I really didn't have time to stress out. Or to be afraid, which I thought I would save

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