Stop me before I click again!

After spending most of the day getting caught up on all manner of piddly little problems, I am now a lean, mean clicking machine.

A transfer student wants to major in English and needs to register for classes: I click my way through the online course catalog in search of classes that still have space (very few) and then click on through the registration process to get her a meaningful schedule of classes.

My son needs his student loan cosigned for fall semester--his penultimate semester in college! I click my way through the Wells-Fargo site, wondering how long it will take them to insist that I fax them a recent pay stub to verify my income. How many times have I answered these same questions and faxed the same supporting documents? Don't think about it--just keep clicking.

My proposal to present a paper at a conference in Prague in November was accepted, so I clicked my way through a travel site to book a flight, clicked through another site to book lodging at the conference hotel, clicked through the process of paying the conference fee online, and then clicked open the application for a travel grant to cover all these expenses. I won't learn whether the travel grant is approved until October at the earliest, but the conference deadlines are much sooner than that and the airfare will just increase the longer I wait, so I'm booking everything now and trusting that the college isn't planning to drastically cut travel funds this fall.

And I clicked my way through a deluge of e-mail that piled up after I took Friday off. How much e-mail can pile up on one business day? Enough to fill my morning with clicking and typing, clicking and typing.

Now I've finally run out of stuff to click on and I'm ready for a break. The Annual Autumn Many-Meeting Marathon begins tomorrow. If any of my meetings includes a clicking contest, the smart money is on me.