My scramble to get home was because I’d only taken a day of pills with me. Otherwise, I would have stayed and puttered around at the sandwich store. Alaine never assigns a task that lasts longer than 15 minutes, so I like it there. I have no experience at food prep, though I’ve made iced tea. They sell very little tea but the franchise requires they carry it. Alaine treated me some clam chowder, great stuff but also my RDA of sodium. Here’s a photo of Alaine stocking the chips.That brings up the question, how’s my new change in diet? Subtle. More protein, less carbs, it fills you up quicker but not for as long. Years ago, I knew a lady who gave me some tea she described as cleansing. For a few days, it left your kidneys feeling warm. Really, I mean, both internally and to the touch on your back. She said that was getting rid of accumulated poisons, which made sense if you consider second-hand preservatives as toxic as you should. That’s what this feels like.
My doc strictly forbids any bread except whole wheat, so I sampled as many forms of it as I could find. Whole wheat pasta, whole wheat cereals, and even whole wheat porridge. The result was realization the only form I like it is in bread. Sorry, the other stuff tastes way too much like health food. Pretty much the same goes for brown rice. I’ve read many sources that say narrow taste preference is a result of agriculture. That seems reasonable. Once foragers became farmers, it’s commonsense they would plant only that which produced the best or grew the fastest. Collective failure spelled famine, but that was the trade-off for not having to race down and spear lunch.
To avoid the worst of Miami on the return leg, I stayed well west and then 441. I’d intended to stop but the weather was perfect so I drove it non-stop. I still get shudders when I remember how I used to drive rush hour every day. Did you see how SUVs are getting a stabilizer? Such things make for even worse drivers. Corner hard, the computer will save you. I thought SUV rollovers were already doing a fine job of keeping down the total number of idiots on the roadways.
ADDENDUM
Here’s that dashing fellow in the restaurant back office, marking the date on supply boxes and generally making an assistant of himself. That’s correct, I do the same work as a staff of seven regular clerical employees. Plus, I can fix the printer, rewire the phones, and reboot the cash register. Alas, those days are over. But in my time, I made money twice as fast as anybody else in my field.I point out that clerical work was never my career. I learned it all from spontaneous necessity. I had the first computer, the first printer, the first of almost everything back in the early 80s and it was impossible to find any good help. (It still is.) Thus, I was among the first to computerize my home business records. I’ve still got many of the original modeling layouts and they are more valid today because they met empirical needs rather than some hoo-ha programmer’s fantasy code.
I still find it far easier to design a custom spreadsheet than get into rat race of keeping up with Quickbook versions. I attended the first computer accounting courses back in 1983, by which time I was already an accountant (though that was not my day job). If I recall, it was Peachtree on six 5-1/4” floppies and what monkeyshine that was. Ordinary 2-step procedures became complicated 35-step quagmires all the while proclaiming this was an improvement. I finally quit Peachtree altogether in Los Angeles in 1991 because the operator’s manual didn’t make sense.
Quickbooks was the software which changed the business climate, although that is not what it was supposed to do. Follow along here: Before Quickbooks, the general flow of record-keeping had to be learned by each individual. This took I’d say, six months on the job. The law says only that businesses must record their transactions and report the total at specified intervals. Absolutely nothing else is legally required. This left business with all manner of leeway on how those transactions were recorded. Ask Bernie Madoff.
This does not mean that the system was wrong. Madoff was a thief and he was repeatedly caught by legitimate accountants. It was the authorities that ignored the warnings. It is up to the authorities, not Quickbooks, to enforce the law. You see where I’m going with this. The next thing you know, Quickbooks is choke full of quirks that would not begin to fool a real crook.
I was intimidated by the needless modules contained in Quickbooks—modules that could not be disabled. Instead of tracking transactions, it seemed designed to maximize your taxes and enhance the ability of strangers to snoop into your non-tax affairs. And I still feel it prefers tax guidelines to proper accounting, and that is so not right.
We’ve all seen how often the less-than-best dominates a market segment. Google. MicroSoft. Adobe. Amazon. AOL. All crap, but crap that became 800-pound gorillas. Same with Quickbooks. It didn’t matter what was bad, as long as it was cheap and had visual appeal to Secretary Sally, who could now spew out reports by the dozen and do her nails simultaneously. Worse, the software required extra payment for the one part everybody needed: payroll. That’s a clerical, not an accounting function (after it is set up).
The original software version was terrible, it did not even use double-entry. Anybody could easily print themselves up an extra check or two. I was often called in to troubleshoot offices where the secretaries regularly tore up and threw away spoiled checks off the printer. And the printers of the day spoiled the first check of every run. But, by 2003, everybody found it easier to change business practices to match Quickbooks than to do things right. That’s what I’m talking about.
