Reasons why I should have had a heart attack today:

1) I get a letter from school informing me that they have not recieved a copy of some forms, so they were just politely informing me that I owe them just shy of 13 thousand dollars for the semester.

2) I was informed that I could not work (and thus not receive a paycheck) until the afforementioned forms were processed which will be a minimum of 2 weeks.

3) My school e-mail account was inexplicably shut down, and the campus computing center I.T. people had no idea why.

and last but certainly not least: 4) Upon my return home from learning about all three of the previous problems, I walk in to my bedroom to check my computer messages only to find that I had none...

I guess I should be more specific. There have been a great many times when I've walked in to check my messages and found that nobody had anything to say to me in my absence, this time was different though. The difference was that when I walked in and realized I had no messages it was because I had no computer. (Go back and read that last sentence again... go ahead, do it now... I'll wait.) Yeah. In the world of a college student who is used to having a computer, and with classes only four days away, if there's any justification for a heart attack, that's probably going to rank right up there at the top. So there I stood, looking at where my computer should have been and wasn't. I looked back on the counter, Jennie's old laptop was right where it had been, I went back to the back and saw that Jennie's office laptop and desktop computers were both in their normal places. There is no obvious damage to either door, televisions and any other items of value had not been touched, so now confusion sets in on top of panic. I call Jen to see if for some strange reason she'd come in while I was gone and taken my computer. I called her cell, got voicemail. I called her office, got voicemail. Called her cell again. SHIT. No answer. (I am literally shitting my pants at this point.) So I try to think... (please note I said tried to think, because it was a task that required some degree of effort and focus and was still mostly unsuccessful).

After about five minutes of trying to think about who else had a key to our apartment, and what reasoning could possibly explain why anyone would ever need to remove my computer, and what the hell I was going to do without it, I knew I had to wait until I'd heard from Jennie before calling the police and/or the landlord/maintenance man. It was about this time that a small hispanic man walked in through the back door of the apartment. He was strolling in like he lived here and saw me at which point we had the following exchange:

Liz: "Umm hello?"
Hispanic fellow: "OH! Hello!"
Liz: "Seeing as you have just keyed into my apartment, you wouldn't happen to know anything about a missing laptop computer, would you?"
Hispanic fellow: (Walking into my bedroom without really justifying his presence in my apartment) "Uhh, yeah, I have it... It's here, we had an emergency."
Liz: "Erm, well, is there a reason why you came into my apartment while I was gone and took it without my permission?"
Hispanic fellow: "Uhhh, you'd have to talk to Tom about that." (Hispanic fellow calls Tom the building maintenance man and tells him to come talk to me) "Tom said he'd be right down."
Liz: "Yeah, thanks... is that all?"
Hispanic fellow: "Yes, he'll be here soon. Goodbye."
[Hispanic fellow lets himself out the back door, and shortly thereafter Tom arrives.]
Tom: "Yeah, hi, sorry, we had an emergency and we needed a laptop, and since we'd recently worked on the hookups in your apartment, we knew you had one."
Liz: "You needed a laptop so you took mine without permission, and without giving me any kind of notice?"
Tom: "Yeah, sorry about that."
Liz: "Well that's all well and good, but in the meantime, I think I defacated on the floor and had a stroke."
Tom: "Yeah, you see it was an emergency, and I don't get paid to deal with the computers, (blah blah blah, poor excuse) and I'm sorry."

Yeah, so he apologized profusely, but that doesn't shore us up for the fact that I gonna need a pacemaker and a fresh pair of underwear to get things back to some semblance of normalcy. Oh yeah, and then there's the cursory, "I feel violated."