You know what goes through your mind. The hassle. The expense. The cowardice and selfishness of the person who hit it and then didn't bother to leave a note. I was, as they say, fit to be tied.

I was still fuming about it that evening when I was watching the news on TV. Until, that is, I watched a mother and father being interviewed about their daughter being struck and killed by a hit-and-run driver. She was 14.

I was, rightfully, even more angry at myself than I had been at the person who put a dent in my car. A stupid dent. It was a pretty good reminder of how important it is not to sweat the small stuff.

It's a reminder that a lot of people in Massachusetts would do well to ponder. Especially today, as Louis Gutierrez assumes his position as the state's CIO and takes a seat that had gotten too hot for his predecessor, Peter Quinn, who resigned last month.

What stoked the fire under that seat was, of all things, Massachusetts' plan to adopt the XML-based OpenDocument format as a standard for saving files. To give you an idea of what's at stake here, Sun's StarOffice productivity suite and IBM's Workplace support OpenDocument; Microsoft Office does not.