People who always view things in the most negative light possible pose a weird impossibility. If we got visited by Martians or any beings of superior intelligence, how would they know? Here, try this one. It took me an hour to make sweet potatoes. Therefore I must be dumb, right? For the first time in my life, I had to figure out how to boil sweet potatoes (the clue is in this sentence). I seem some of you are having difficulty concluding anything but that I must be dumb. Here’s a hint: I never boiled them before. I can see all the types from New York concluding I couldn’t figure out how to boil water, because we all know they are so smart up in that area. Could explain why they live there.
First, I traded words with my new client. Plainly, we cannot work together. The problem is that he does not know how to use a computer and I do. I know that he wants the check balances. But he wants each of the accounts done start to finish one by one and does not recognize any better way. It is like trying to build a house by going and getting one piece at a time, but the moment you stop to get a whole load, of something, they complain that you are building the house. The spat was over whether I do it my way or his way, and if he wants in done his way he will have to hire a filing clerk. I was hired to clean the system up, not to do the work in the most drudge manner possible.
I zip into the office at day’s end to discover that Ruth has been complaining about being “let down by everybody”, and that includes me. The problem there is her nearly complete lack of understanding about how the Internet works. I suspect she felt once she had a web page she could conduct interactive e-commerce through her “web site”. Nothing of the kind exists, all she has is a simple web advertising page. Furthermore, she has gone so far into this that to back out now means serious financial loss. I point out that I had nothing to do with it getting to that stage, she was on a one-way steamroller down that street before I arrived.
She wants “everything back”. I’ll have to find out what that is, for all I have here are scans of 8 doggie pictures and one of Letterman, the originals are in her filing cabinet. She told Fred that everybody took her money and let her down. Ahem, I was paid only for actual hours spent on her site while she was present (plus one hour for doing the scans, but that is super easy to check up on). I never charged her one penny for the hours I spent on that web page.
Also, let me explain something, dumb-bunny that I am. DSL, Digital Subscriber Line, is a grade of service, not the equipment used to provide it. I personally think that DSL was discovered by accident while the phone company was trying to solve noise problems with its century-old wiring. When you push a digital signal down the analog line, after a certain point you can hear it. The idea is to filter that particular “frequency” out of the line. It is still there, but now you cannot hear it. Then you can push the digital signal down the wire and still use the phone like always, up to a point. That point is around 18,000 feet of copper wire.
The technology is kind of deep, but there is one thing I can tell you that anyone can understand. This should be plain enough – you are not getting anything like the speed you think you are paying for with DSL and you never will. The phone company, the largest supplier of DSL service by far, knows very well that of every 200 subscribers, only 19 are using the phone at any given time. You can bet nearly your life that they are doing the same thing with their Internet connections. If you are the average person, you don’t even know how to test the speed of your connection.
Since things didn’t go all that well today, I did what I usually do. I committed suici . . .
Just kidding. I went out and bought a Reader’s Digest condensed book and sat down to read some fiction. From what I now know about books, any of you budding authors had better think twice. I have the skinny by knowing the amounts of money that actually trickle down to the author. It is not pretty.
The book titles show that the few people that do read are not a very sophisticated bunch. You would be wasting time producing quality, it just does not sell. There are a dribble of writers who have found the ticket, producing shallow books with provocative titles. Books on how to help your child with math homework only make sense if the parent can do the work themselves. Last I heard brains were not a requirement to have children. Hey, just look at my critics. Before you begin your manuscript, ask yourself if you can live on an average of $676 twice a year.
You are also smarter to write books that are easily adapted to movies or TV with cheap sets and cheaper actors. A guidebook will not sell unless you rename it a gay lesbian guide book. Or an empowered pregnancy guide book. There are no independent bookstores left, you have to get on the shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. If they do not buy your book, you are out a lot of time and money. Well, there are a few independent bookstores, but they are tiny and are generally forced to follow the leader.
Two things. Forget the first one. The second is the answer to y’day’s riddle. It was a one cubic inch piece of peanut butter fudge. Why, what did you think it was?
