I once was working as a boat skipper on a cruising catamaran that I had designed and overseen the building of down in the Islands. Shortly before the project was finished I had worked late into the night on the boat doing final outfitting. The boat was in the water just outside our boatshop and I didn’t feel like making the drive home so got a blanket and yoga mat out of my truck and slept on the boat. It really felt good to be the first to sleep on the boat and I slept like a baby. I was awoken by the owner/client coming down to get and early start and he asked my if I would like to skipper his boat until he finished up business in the states prior to leaving for his dream voyage to dive the islands of the South Pacific. I told him I would give 2 weeks notice to the boat builders and he said to not bother, he had already taken care of that for me!
I brought my CAD station on board with me when I moved aboard (electric hybrid drive with lots of battery capacity) and spent almost a year knocking around the Caribbean while the owner was faced with delay after delay with closing up shop in the states and us leaving for the Panama Canal. I did a lot of designs on board for cruising and racing catamarans and trimarans and felt like doing so in beautiful tropic anchorages was a real inspiration.
Fellow sailors and cruisers often thought it weird that I could hole up inside the boat all day and not get out to dive, windsurf, or tour the locations that I visited. I had a new friend make me promise to shut down the computer and join him for a nice daysail on his boat and said that his hot girlfriends old college roomate would be joining us. That was tempting enough to accept his offer and he said he would call me on the VHF radio in the morning just before shoving off.
Of course I had my snorkling gear ready in the dingy and was at my computer working on my latest fantasy multihull design in Rhino the next morning and when I heard the hail coming from the two wave radio mounted over the chart table which my monitor and computer had taken over, I snapped out of my compulsive 3d modeling mode and raised my hand to my mouth and pushed the the ‘press to speak’ button (I thought!) and answered his hail but got no further reply other than his repeated hail. We went back and forth several times and I stood to adjust the gain and squelch on the radio with still no contact. I suggested we try a different channel and switched from Ch 16 which is the hailing channel to a working channel and still no luck. I could see his boat with the girls running around on deck taking off sail covers so I switched back to the hailing channel to try one more time.
It was only then that I saw the VHF handset still in its cradle on the radio and realized that I had been speaking into my computer mouse the whole time!
Still that day was one of the best Rhino interventions ever once I shut down and got away from the computer!