I always enjoy the freelancer camaraderie of people nestled around laptops in cafes. Yesterday, grantwriting at the Au Bon “Free Wifi” Pain on Adams, across the street from the Symphony, a group of businessmen asked me to watch their laptop, several times, as they went to get food and prolong their meeting. On one of these trips, they came back with a bag of chocolate chip cookies for me, which they gave to me like this: “You gonna be here for awhile? You want some cookies?”

“One day,” one of the guys said to another, “you’re going to ask the wrong person to watch your computer – and then you’ll lose the computer and the cookies!”