When I was a child, I remember that I used to have a peculiar problem whenever I replaced my watch. For days or weeks after strapping the new one on to my wrist, I'd wonder what the time was, look at my watch … and then feel unsatisfied, as if somehow I still didn't actually know what the time was in spite of having just read it off. I'd feel a strong urge to go and find another clock and look at that. It's as if I didn't trust the new watch.

I suppose it's possible that this was my subconscious reminding me of the practical consideration that I didn't yet have a feel for how accurate the new watch was, but that seems far-fetched to me. I think it was just a nonspecific feeling of ‘this thing is newfangled, it has to prove itself’.

I haven't replaced my watch in well over a decade, so until today I had no idea whether I would still have this odd feeling. But just now …

I've recently acquired an iPad, and also I've finally got round to setting up wireless networking at home to use it with. So today I thought I'd do my morning spod – check email, LJ, news, etc – before getting out of bed. (Just to prove I could, and also because it's warmer.)

So I did that; but as soon as I got up, I felt a strong visceral urge to make for the nearest ‘real’ computer and reassure myself that there weren't any urgent emails waiting for me. But I just looked! Arrgh!

(This is even less rational than the one about the watch. A new watch might have turned out to be hopelessly inaccurate compared to the old one, but I check my email over SSH, which is really, really not going to present me with wrong answers depending on where I connect from. If it gives me any recognisable answer at all, it'll be the right one.)