The Futon of the Computer World

When I worked in high-tech, the IT guys were special envoys from the gods who had magical powers. They climbed into the ceilings and snaked cable through cube walls to make amazing things happen on our computers. When they upgraded our systems, there was short inconvenience followed by increased performance and productivity.

Not so the government. They send us emails telling us mandatory "upgrades" will stealthily be put on our computers in the dark of night, and the result is "Your computer will take longer to startup and shutdown", and "CD/DVDs or USB drives inserted in your computer will no longer automatically start." To add insult to injury, our homepages on Internet Explorer wil be locked into the internal homepage, which opens at the speed of a tree sloth.

Why would any IT Department make these kinds of changes? "These updates are required to comply with recent government requirements to meet or exceed security controls for all governmnet agencies. " Oh.

No magical envoys are showing up to make my life better--but we will share a clumsy behemoth with a whole bunch of other government divisions. We're the "futon" of the computer world. (Merge a perfectly good couch and a perfectly good bed into a futon and what do you get? A mutant that is no good for sitting or sleeping.) Same principle here: merge a good computer system in one division and a good one from another division, and what do you get? A sloth of a system that doesn't work well for anyone!

Regulations trump efficiency every time. But who are we going to complain to? We are the government--we are the ones who write the regulations!

Yep, we're from the government, and we're here to help.

Analog Brain in a Digital World

I love tiny travel alarm clocks. Or I did, when I knew how to operate them. I'm a 12-hour clock kind of a person who has been late to work more than once from wrongly setting a 24-hour clock. My solution lately is to keep a $5 analog, battery-operated clock at my bedside as my real waker-upper, because waking up is serious business that can only be trusted to a timepiece with only one purpose: to ring when I want it to.

Tonight, I was awakened from a sound sleep by loud beeping in the living room. I rolled over and groaned. I knew right away it was that evil digital travel alarm I bought because it was pretty and promised a timer function (it didn't have one.) It turns out it this demon device has about 25 features controlled by three buttons, none of which says "alarm off" or "set date," like a reasonable clock would do. I stuffed it under a couch cushion because I was tired last night and couldn't figure out how to correct its settings after accidentally squeezing the wrong button. Bad idea.

Tonight's solution wasn't much better, but it is effective. I fumbled with all three buttons until I found one that made the alarm stop screaming. Temporarily, it turns out--it began again five minutes later, after I was back upstairs. "All right, that's it!" I told the recalcitrant clock. I stomped to the coat closet and retrieved my ancient metal toolbox with the unreliable metal clasp. Congratulating myself for remembering to hold the bottom and avoid scattering tools all over the carpet, I successfully manuevered it to the table next to the clock. "We'll just see what you can do without your battery!" I snarled. I think the clock trembled just a little bit (or maybe that was just my astigmatism.) I found the small phillips screwdriver and twisted the tiny screw on the lilliputian battery door until I realized I wasn't getting anywhere. Still snarling, I pried it up with a regular screwdriver and removed its little heart. Add "clock murderer" to my resume, I guess.

Now I'm going back to bed to sleep until my trusty $5 clock wakes me up. The digital clock with its various parts and instruction sheet ("Please to press button 1 for make date...") slumbers quietly in a zip-lock bag. Maybe I can find an unsuspecting friend on whom to palm it off. I'll tell them what a great alarm it has--there's no way they'll sleep through it. I know. I tried.

King of the World

Sometimes I envy gamers, who chase each other around their virtual worlds, fighting battles and razing imaginary countrysides. We writers tend to be odd folks who type furiously at our keyboards for hours to produce a just few paragraphs. Not exactly team players, and definitely not your A-list party folks.

We can, however, get together and write. How does that work, you wonder (if you're not rolling your eyes or snoring at this point.) Tonight a few of my writer friends and I met to listen to each other's latest writing and practice our craft spontaneously. We pulled slips of paper with previously written phrases from a box and wrote about them for five or ten minutes. We timed the writings. The rules are that you don't edit as you go and you have to keep writing, even if you have nothing to say ("I have nothing to say" is popular in this circumstance). Spontaneous creativity can be amazing. Enthralling scenarious often emerge, sometimes even surprising their authors.

Tonight we viewed a one-minute clip of a hot air balloon flying and landing. Three different writers wrote three completely different 10-minute pieces based on what they saw. One was dramatic, one was humorous, and one was touching. Who knew you could have so much fun sitting quietly around a table with notebooks and pens? (I did mention that we writers are odd folk, didn't I?)

So, maybe I don't envy gamers so much tonight. They have to play in the confines of the worlds programmers created for them. Each one of us writers creates our own worlds, like mad scientists, then we sit in our little cubbyholes and mess with our people's lives. We create them, kill them, and manipulate every little detail of their lives. Gamers seem almost benign by comparison, don't they?

Have the Bushtits been There All Along?

People talking on cell phones while driving do incomprehensible things, like crashing into the backs of big DOT trucks covered in flashing lights or wandering off the side of the road. This we know. However, I'm beginning to suspect we may all be that distracted by our busy lifestyles--so much so that we walk and drive right past amazing little bits of nature every day without even noticing.

Earlier this week, I got out of my car (a miracle in and of itself) to mail a letter in one of those blue R2D2 corner mailboxes. Next to the mailbox was a squat, naked tree full of gnarls and stubby branches. I suspect in spring I will find it is a cherry tree, but right now it's just a loose collection of sticks. The tree was swarming with tiny twittering birds whose odd little beaks looked like the tips of nails. They paid no attention to the three similar trees nearby; they just climbed and hopped over and under the branches of this one.

I stood with my mouth open (demonstrating a complete lack of attention to the laws of probability, given that I was standing under a tree full of birds), bemused by the tiny, cute creatures. I've lived here nearly 20 years and have never seen this phenomenon before. The birds paid no attention to me, even though my head was very close to them. They were totally focused on whatever it was they were doing--which was something I couldn't figure out just by looking at them.

It only took a few minutes to find them on the internet. Bushtits (don't you love it?) stick together in groups of 40 or more and eat stuff they glean off leaves and twigs of trees. How have I never seen this before? Too much time driving and too little time walking? Too much time thinking about the next thing instead of being in the moment? Oh, I hope I pay more attention in the future. Those little birds delighted me with their sudden, enchanting appearance. How nice it would be to have more experiences like that!

The Kindest Part of the Newspaper

When I get too beaten down by the horrible bad news in the daily paper, I turn to the one place where I know I'll find kind, loving, sweet words--in the Obituaries. Yes, I know these people are dead, yes I know the people who wrote the obituaries are very sad, but somehow these ordinary people write some of the sweetest (and sometimes most amusing) stuff in the paper.

Today I learned that a 93-year-old Japanese American woman, who was known for crocheting and helping at church events, loved to play basketball when she was in high school. Did any of the church ladies know that? Wouldn't they have been surprised (and loved it) if they had? A lifelong pilot got his love of flying when he was nine and hopped in a bi-plane with a barnstorming pilot and his aunt (who must have been a real character). I love that story.

I often read that someone is survived by a "loving wife." If Young Geezer was to meet his demise when we were in the middle of one of our 2-day brouhahas, would I be able to write that? Or would I have to be honest and say, "...surived by his cranky wife who is still waiting to get the last word"?

Long lists of accomplishments are popular, but the words that always touch my heart are the ones that show how loved the person was. A family wrote about their homeless, alcohol-addicted son and brother and emphasized how hard he tried and how many times he succeeded. Wow. Wouldn't it be nice to think that no matter what a screw-up you think you are, someone loves you anyway and will say good things about you when you're gone? I'd like that. Hey, maybe I'll write the words myself and ask Young Geezer to be sure they make it into my obituary if I "precede him in death," as they say. (Or would he think I'm just trying to have the last word?)

Who Was that Masked Woman?

I'm too damn old to have a cold. And I'm too damn cranky to have a cold and work eight hours a day. But since I'm not unconscious or dead, I can't really justify staying home like I did when I was a kid and it was fun. Now it's just boring. So I needed to figure out a way I could be at work without sharing my germ-ridden status with my co-workers. They seem like nice enough folks, but I suspect they could turn into a medieval mob crying for blood if I brought pestilence into their midst. Best not to find out.

The Vent from Hell, which is directly over my desk, began spewing dust a couple of weeks ago as our underpowered heating/air conditioning system struggled mightily to single-handedly combat the the northwest winter. Each time the heat came on, the fibrous cloud caused a chorus of hacking and coughing throughout the cube maze. I needed protection--and I knew just what to do. I brought in the masks I wear on airplanes to counteract perfume and germs. They are pretty effective; I don't often get sick after traveling by air, and being placed next to one of those perfume-drenched people who believe "more is better" no longer results in hours of groveling before flight attendants to get my seat changed. Sure, the masks worked well on airplanes, but were they a match for the demon vent of dusty death?

Success! The Vent from Hell was vanquished--but not in time. I have a damn cold. I can't stand the idea of staying at home thinking my cranky old thoughts, but I hate it when people come to work and cough in their hands and sneeze all over the workspace. My solution? I'm sitting in my cube wearing a mask like a fugitive from a hospital, wiping my hands like an OCD sufferer (think Monk, the TV detective), and causing double-takes in the hallways.

"Why are you wearing the mask?" asked on co-worker, "is it for your protection or ours?" Never one to pass up a chance to look good, I said, "Yours, of course." I smiled behind my mask, but naturally, he couldn't tell. That's one disadvantage of wearing a mask. People have to guess from your eyes what your expression is. Jack Nicholson could probably scare the crap out of you in a mask, and Carrie Underwood would still look gorgeous--me, I just look kind of like an owl.

My mask filters out dust and keeps in humidity; I don't cough and sneeze nearly so much with it on. I found out the hard way, however, to keep gum or mints handy--I about asphyxiated after a garlic-laden lunch.

One co-worker suggested I create "mood masks" with smiling or drooping mouths to match my attitude. I don't think so. My boss already thinks I'm weird, and the "gnashing teeth" mask probably wouldn't be his favorite. Mona Lisa was on to something with that mysterious smile; maybe I can look mysterious behind a mask. (What? It could happen!)