My technologies are suddenly making me very nervous. Yesterday, at the end of a very long and stressful day, I came home and found my laptop open — I was quite convinced I’d closed it before leaving — and Skype running on the screen. And I absolutely know that I had not been running Skype before I left. Now, granted, I had a conference call earlier in the day, one we’d hoped to conduct that way, but one member of the group wasn’t Skype-able, so we ended up using phones. And I was in the office. Could somebody attempting to Skype me when I didn’t have the program running have triggered it to start up? It’s either that or the cats are chatting when I’m not home, because I choose not to think about any other alternatives.

Then, just now, I came into my office to drop some stuff off after class, and used the speakerphone to dial down and see if a colleague was in his office. And noticed that the red light labeled “MIC” was lit on the phone. Which it has never ever been before. And when I hung up from the speakerphone call, the display was flashing “MIC.” And so now I’m just paranoid enough to wonder whether somebody could have turned on the microphone in my desk telephone for nefarious purposes.

As if that’s not enough, I now have to go check on my program’s library, which somebody apparently attempted to break into yesterday. I could really stand it if the world gave me a little less to be nervous about.