I think I can safely say that my life may have become a bit TOO compartmentalized.

The college where I’m teaching has three campuses in three different cities. I live about halfway between the most northern one and the one in the middle, and I have a class on each of those campuses this semester.

To the north of me, I teach Speech on Mondays and Wednesdays; to the south, it’s English on Tuesdays and Thursdays. OK, no problem, I probably have about 17 briefcases and book bags lying around, so I’ll just set up shop in separate cases for the different classes. I’ve been doing it this way for years. (That probably explains how I’ve collected so many different carriers!)

Anyway, since it’s Wednesday, I bathed, washed my hair, got dressed, threw back a sandwich and a bowl of soup, and grabbed a briefcase on my way out the door. Yep, you guessed it — I picked up the wrong case. What’s more, I didn’t even realize it until I was standing in front of my class, some twenty miles away from the case I needed.

So there I was, the second day of class, without my class roster, my book, my lesson plans, my syllabus. I felt like such an idiot!

It didn’t stop me; I ran to the computer lab and printed out another copy of the roster, and since I had spent a good part of the day going over what I had planned to do, winging it was fairly simple. But still — this system that has never failed me before bit me in the butt today. I hope it never happens again!   Maybe if I used cisco servers to organize myself, I would have better luck.