One year ago today: October 7, 2013, quiet day.
Five years ago today: 2009, 88-inch shoelaces
Ten years ago today: temporarily suspended, I will notify you.
MORNING
Yep, my old job, or should I say jobs, are posted again. It’s a revelation of how the phone system works, that they have such trouble finding and keeping inside people. Most of you have seen the outside people, most have never seen anyone on the inside. Part of the reason, in my extensive experience, is that the inside people get monitored the most, while I recall times the roving supervisors have caught seventeen installer trucks parked behind the stripper bar on New Year’s Eve.
But at my age, I’m more after benefits than money. If you look at that link and notice a huge number of postings for places mentioned in this blog (Metarie, Hammond, West Palm, Boynton, Savannah) this is a fluke.
This photo shows a tech working on Strowger switches, the clicking sound you used to hear in the background of movies. He is not wearing a phone [headset], but he would normally be in communication with someone like me, in the remote office, testing the switches as he turned them up. There were only 19 switches (dial tones) for every 200 customers. You can count them in this bank, the 20th is a supervisory switch.
The media reports AT&T hired 570 in S. Florida this year, but that is undoubtedly counting sales jobs, which are not really jobs to start with. There are approximately 20 people in the phone company for each lineman or installer who actually gets any work done. Here is a list of the names for phone exchanges. I was the Hemlock man, though I often worked in Trinity, Alpine, and Templeton.
Trivia. At one time, there were no 95x or 59x numbers because those combinations contained no vowels.
NOON
Nothing happened at noon. I either read my new book or slept right through whatever happened around this time today. Must be nice.
Hold it, there is something to write. Finally, it has arrived. Face detection software so cheap you can use it for home security. The rumor is that it even works on pets. The el-cheapo ArcSoft people even have an offering called Simplicam. I do not endorse this product, however, because ArcSoft can be nasty when you install their software. It likes to bully any other editing apps you may have on board. That, and how their earlier perfectly good free versions won’t run on Win 8.1. Another reason to keep your XP working.
Yes, I know about 32 and 64 bit systems. But, ArcSoft, I have programs from other sources that seem to have no problems running on both machines. So it can be done.
NIGHT
The world awaits the outcome of the big audition. Sadly, I will never again be in a band both as fantastic and as useless as the last one. This new group tonight is a bar band. Plain and simple, since around 1990, if you are playing in a band, you are playing in drinking establishments. That is your venue, that is where you must compete. And there is not enough work to go around, so you either compete or never work.
The actuality that I am not a bar musician is not a negative. I make a dandy bar bass player. And in bars, the slightest amount of extra talent or effort can be decisive in the band's appeal. Here’s the situation last evening, without specifically pointing at anyone.
There is nothing wrong with comping or following the guitar player. However, let's get something clear: when there is a bassist like me in the lineup, those methods become serious mistakes, first magnitude mistakes. I don’t have to outrun the bear. Put me up after a a bassist who fakes it and of course, I'll make the song come alive. These are nice people, studio trained, but they all play with their fingertips and have a common sound.
Minutes into the process (and I was there an hour) I picked up the guitar player’s demeanor, he was a wait-and-see sort who really may have seen it all, music-wise. He’s had countless bassists follow him rather than learn the songs. On my turn, I purposely turned by back to prove I was not following anything.
Ah, experience takes over. If you can’t learn the whole song, at least ace the intro and outro, my specialty. I don’t such much play bass as perform bass. And they were visibly swayed by my ability to “solo” the bass lines, which
You know by now I am also auditioning the band. Their sound was less than impressive, but it is more than enough to plow through the south Florida scene. These guys look like burly bikers except the singer, who looks like, well, quite frankly, he looks like a skinny waiter, but he is the guy holding this thing together.
And right now, if it meant I could be out there with my bass in front of a ground-pounding crowd, I would join the worst band in the county.
These guys are well above that level, they’ve got real stage time under their belts. Can’t fool me. Bass-wise, all I need do is give them time to talk. I may not win, but I’m a finalist.
ADDENDUM
The new book, “The Nautical Chart”, is becoming as useful as some of the texts I’ve read. Because it is so well written, I learned the instruments I want are called W & HC and Blundell Harling. Which I will look up right now. And also that the Glory of God (Dei Gloria) sunk at 4°51’E and 37°32’N, which I will also investigate. These are passages I would normally have glossed over as minor details in such a story, which focuses on the blonde babe and her topography, you know, her “faded jeans with slight wrinkles at the groin and knees”.
As for the Dei Gloria, I caution not to just go use any of the on-line map coordinate offerings, in particular, not to use “Find Latitude and Longitude”. These are Google map operating shells and they record everything you look at with no way to delete your history. It’s probably nothing, but they have really gone through lengths to keep tabs on your activities.
Hmmm, these on-line apps are an introduction to even more magnificent idiots. They want you to use their whacked out formulas instead of the standard degrees/minutes/seconds of navigation. So far, I’ve got Del Gloria sinking in the town of Minter, Alabama and in Chamo Lake in Ethiopia. Here we go, it is 14 miles offshore of a town called Beni Ksila in Algeria, god-forsaken Algeria. What can I infer?
The date, 1751, means the coast line must have been in sight, as there was no other way of getting so exact a longitude. At that distance, it must also have been light since I can find no evidence of lighthouses on the North African coast. If you want to find out how shallow the “knowledge” is on the Internet, try to find the locations of lighthouses worldwide. Good luck. But I did learn that 19 US states (and two provinces) are landlocked. What? Oh, sorry, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
There are four lighthouses in Manitoba all located on Lake Winnipeg. Versus 102 in the state of Michigan.
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