I was up late last evening going over the options. The bottom line is except for the band, there is very little holding me in Florida. Marti says it is not much better in Washington but I’d prefer to be there. I’m a city type, there is nothing I can do for a living that would let me survive in a small town. I’ve made a lot of headway toward that in terms of retirement preparation but it would still not be wise for me to move to a smaller area.
This is wrong, for I have no intention of living in a city when I’m up there [in my seventies]. I won’t starve and I’ve always known I would do some kind of work which I always assumed would be writing. I know that is a tough market but so is everything else I could possible do for a living. The sooner I start, the sooner I’ll begin to find out what these things pay. Writing seems to be the worst field I have ever seen for rates of pay.
I mean it, go out and try to find out what a writer makes for a living. There are a few articles on those who make it big, which hardly helps anybody out. A few jobs mention rates of pay so low that they can’t be serious or what they want really is only worth $9 an hour.
Interestingly, even The G is aware that he must get a real job. This means that all important bachelor’s degree. He looked into the community education paper which I warned him about long ago. They use your interest in any courses to pressure you into signing up for an $8,000 degree. He said no, that must be the wrong paper I had read, so he brought his to the gig at Cort’s. In less than thirty seconds, I showed him the scam. What he thought was $635 was closer to $2,500 per segment. There are three segments.
I’d noticed at seventeen that first year university was a repeat of grade 12, for me total waste of $2,000 (in 1971, or around $15,000 today). Distrust for these degree programs comes natural for me. I don’t deny their value in the marketplace and I’d rather hang out with people who own a degree than otherwise. Yet it has become virtually impossible to tell who has one by listening to them. The word “own” implies something you buy, an intentional choice here. What would I be willing to pay for a degree?
I know. $8,000. One of the more common scams is for the school to downplay the cost by pointing out you will gain back the money through increased lifetime earnings. However, their pricing is high for that fact and they are quick to hand you a student loan form. College and used cars fun parallels on this count, and for many the car is the better bet. They don’t regularly publish college drop-out rates where I think that would be a very interesting statistic.
Also, you cannot get any info out of college unless you go in and sign up. I made this error years ago. They go in the back room and do a computer search on your history, deciding what they can get you for. Anyone could calculate the direct costs from the calendar so it is obvious to me that very few people actually do. I am not saying the schools are wrong, but they are certainly evil on this count.
So, back to writing. There is no doubt that is what I must do for a living. Do you think I’d ever stick with writing? Not so rhetorical when an examination of my record shows that no matter how good an idea seems, I never stay with it unless it makes money. This is a result of being born poor, not a lack of perseverance. I’ve toyed with the idea many times without a shred of published material. For the zillionth time, I’ll take a look on the internet later to see if anyone will state what they will pay for an article and not go baloney trying to sell me a writer’s course. Do you know I haven’t the most meager idea what a creative journalist does, or what is involved. I do know that I can read my Simon and Shusters and get over 95% of the rules correct with the remainder too obscure to bother with. For that matter, I cannot find any real rules for footnotes, so I use whatever this computer defaults to.
I have not read any blogs for nearly a year, most of them get old on you. They are an evolving art form so I should look again; get myself an update. I kind of divide writing into two categories, nonsense and non-nonsense. I’ve analyzed what I do and the bulk falls within the merged category of informative-persuasive and that spells ad copy. Which, in turn, falls squarely into nonsense. I have no illusions about the industry or what I would do for the cash. Half the problem is deciding which way to go. I have not read Tom Clancey in three years. It would be fair of me to look at some kind of degree, the cheapest one that has anything remote to do with computers.
From here I went directly over to the O’Tooles on Jefferson St. I had correctly surmised that their network was not going to be as easy as Mike said. Sure enough, nothing was set up. Remember, I don’t hump equipment, I only plug in components and test them. Not today. Anything that was not new in the box had to be relocated across the room, then all of it networked. The day turned into a little tale of its own, so stretch back and read on.
After taking inventory of the place, I went back to the shop to pick up parts and gear. Netgear, actually. There were missing parts, mostly interface cables. There were three desktops and one laptop. One desktop was running Win 98, most of which I have forgotten. More like a small office than a home network. I discovered that Netgear does not like modems that have the IP 192.168.1.1 and other nuggets.
It took seven hours, yet everything went according to spec. There was some flak from Netgear who said the 90 day free tech support had expired. I explained American consumer protection laws to them for a few minutes, upon which they called back aafter finding out their database “had the wrong date” entered. My point here, of course, is that a “polite” person would have been suckered into their premium setup assistance program for a product, well, let me stop there. That requires a separate explanation.
Nobody, anywhere could have followed the directions in the package and made that thing work. By the end of two hours, of which almost 45 minutes was wait time, I had followed their directions to set features right out of what most textbooks tell us is a forbidden range. This is not nearly as much fun as I’m making it sound. There has got to be some hard feelings between Windows and Netgear as somebody has moved the goalposts. I’m on the side against Windows because people don’t make any money designing electronics that doesn’t work with the world’s biggest operating system.
From one computer, this system now shares Internet access with three computers. With teenagers in the house, this was probably not an option. To keep me guessing, the BellSouth DSL line kept cutting out. It randomly disappears, and of course, no known computer pops up with a big warning saying “Lost Connection” or any similar helpful message. I’ll speak to Mike, this is not something you send the new guy on. Mind you, I made zero mistakes and, if this is the way it goes, my prices just went up. It was a grinding ordeal despite the fact that most things went smoothly, for instance, I knew exactly how to change the IP addresses, I just didn’t know I had to.
Stay with me, this is all going somewhere. I’ll have to ask the gang about one part of the install. As soon as I connected, a completely bogus home page flooded on screen, and worse, you could not get rid of it. Posing as a find any site fast program, it would have fooled just about anyone. However, while on hold, I had earlier typed in BellSouth’s home page by hand and set it to the default. I noticed that the addresses didn’t match, and worse, that clever programmer somehow got the thing to go into the options settings and put his own home page in the default textbox. So if you were not paying attention and clicked on current, you shot yourself in the foot. That was one incredibly smart piece of code, whoever you are.
But you never got past me, and that is the final test of good material around here. Anna, the lady of the house, is a former instructor. I often pass the time talking about computers, it keeps them from asking a lot of repetitious questions. Does anyone remember that ad from Barry University a few years back? They are looking for instructors, computer instructors. I forget why I didn’t follow it up You can bet it had to do with some kind of paper qualifications. That was before I met Anna.
Who was an instructor there and knows all the professors. Whom she reports have a devil of a time finding good help. She emphasized that does not mean qualified help as there seems to be a little to much of that around the countryside. She is going to make a few phone calls on my behalf. She says it would be evening work to start; I didn’t say “Ah, poor me.”
During one of the boot sequences, which take too long, I jammed on the piano with her 8 year old daughter. But I think it was helping them tell the maid [in Spanish] not to clean the study because we would be moving computers that made the big impression. I was there until nearly 6:00. They gave me a $20 tip and want me back for a few other things shortly. Such as setting up user accounts. That means I should probably learn how.
Back home I made baked chicken thighs with rice again. Never could get enough of a good thing. Add a pot of fresh coffee and I am ready to settle in for the evening. The summer rains are back. What a racket on the tin roof of my Florida room. That was the phone, a friend on Sonny’s named Mado. She needs basic computer lessons, we have a session set up for next Monday at noon.(305) 335-5423.
What else could happen today? How about that summer rain turns into the single longest storm I’ve seen here in six years? It rains in Florida, but never more than a couple of hours and even then, it is a downpour followed by a drizzle. Not this time. This one is a good old-fashioned prairie rainstorm and it has been at it twelve and a half hours now. Plenty of lightning up toward Ft. Lauderdale. I had put on music to read and fell asleep in the chair until 3:30 AM. But not being used to the noise of the rain on the roof, I was woken up every hour or so.
The lightning is getting closer, so I’m shutting down the computer. The good news is that the trailer is solid and dry during the worst of it. The land here must be a few inches higher than Florida normal, a real blessing during wet weather. The quality of the trailer is there. The walls don’t shudder and the windows don’t rattle. But what a rattle on that tin roof. I’m going to get the camcorder.
The photo is part confirmation of how things in Florida really screw you up if you are not constantly on the lookout. You can see my car parked but you may not be able to see that my lights were left on. This is because of that moron at Ford who put in the child locks. The one that I tried to disconnect, but it made the seatbelt alarm ring constantly, and when I reconnected it, the alarm that warns you the headlights are on never worked again. The next moron was the one who designed that parking lot. A dip in the center where the water is eight inches deep. So nobody could pull up to give me a boost, nor could the car be pushed forward without getting very wet.
Nor can you use the old trick of opening your glove box whenever the lights are on, because the Ford design lets everything fall out, and the box cannot be opened when anyone is sitting in the passenger seat. As you see, each moron had the unspoken collaboration of thousands of other morons, all brought together by the acceptability of moron-hood in the State of Florida. There is no law against paving a parking lot with a depression in the center in this town.
The solution? I carry a spare battery in the rear compartment. I can boost my own car from the cigarette lighter. Only took five minutes. The parking lot moron left an approach to the rear passenger door. I told you, Florida morons are just numerous, not clever. Even morons schmuck up, you see.
