One year ago today: March 4, 2020, volunteer, or be forced.
Five years ago today: March 4, 2016, 105°F in the sun.
Nine years ago today: March 4, 2012, my ad for a guitarist.
Random years ago today: March 4, 2009, the disappearing Arnel.
A quick recap of the trip to town y’day. I was up at 5:00AM to be certain to be at a 10:30AM appointment 80 miles away. Foolish. Somehow every gravel truck doing 45 mph knew I had allowed only 2-1/2 hours travel time via Sebring, Arcadia, and Ft. Meyers. I was twenty minutes late. Things still worked out and I continued on through back roads, wishing I was on the sidecar. I tanked up near Everglades city, that we $40 for just over a half-tank. Most of the trip was through old side trails, giving the Reb & I plenty of time to chat.
The vistor center has an auditorium with socially distanced seating and an endless loop video of the park history. I was the only person present, so that was a great hour’s nap in air-conditioned comfort. Arriving in Coal Gables to find mid-semester at the local universities meant not a parking spot to be found. This is a major reason I left. You can think, gee, parking is tough, but consider the reality, which I will tell you. Imagine arriving home and finding somebody in your parking spot. You can’t get a tow truck, because the companies will not dare in case the car belongs to some ethnic who will scream “white supremacy”.
Don’t touch the vehicle in your spot or leave a note on it. If you do that, some time during the next week you will return to find your tires slashed or your windshield bashed. These people are from Cuba and Mexico and know nothing will happen even if they get caught. This rot was just beginning in North Miami when I got here in 1999. It kept creeping north, I kept moving ahead of it. Until 2016, when I got the hell out. There are several ways to explain why the ethnics become this way, I choose the one that comes to mind because I’ve lived and worked in third world countries.
JZ, however, cannot just walk away from it. His condo is smack-dab in middle of this whole mess. And right next door to the west, he’s got Dadeland Mall, narcotic importation and distribution hub of the Confederacy.
Water management.
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You’d think big business, like medical, would move itself toward some form of recognizable cooperation. Now, it’s every man for himself. These haphazard systems are the norm in the computer age. I had such a laugh when MicroSoft Access came out, the first bundled relational database. It encouraged every freak that came along to think his filing system was the best. Last time I dealt with this directly was the employee records at the electric company. I had warned them while still a temp to not use the numbers “alphabetically”, and advised them to have the number encode basid info, such as the month or site he was hired. They didn’t and things got so mixed up they could not be fixed.
Today, I got into the first office, where the network was down. Sure enough, nobody in the place had the skills to process anything by paperwork. Since I had gone there for a referral, this trips up my second appointment. I won’t say how, but I got into the eye doc without the referral and I do have scatoma. But not from exterior damage like I thought. I had rubbed my eyes just like ever, like you probably do in the morning. Unbeknownst to me, my vitreous humor(?) has higher pressure than normal. Like blood pressure?
Inside the eyeball, this pressure squeezes on the tiny vessels and not enough blood was getting to the perimeter. They gave me eyedrops that relieved said pressure and say the vision will return over two weeks at which time we’ll review. But they want a scan of the arteries that feed the eyes, which involves a cardiologist, which means, you guessed it, another referral. By the time I got back, the network was up, but the last person who could have made the referrla had left ten minutes earlier. So instead of drinking coffee back home, here I am in South Miami, waiting for another half day to get that last appointment. What a zoo.
We had a feast of ribs, baked beans, and potato. That was my day in Miami. How did your March 4, 2021 go?
ADDENDUM
Later, JZ decided to find a late night laundromat. He’s still thinking of the old America, the one where businesses had to run themselves at the convenience of the customer. There have been several involuntary resets to that formula but he’s not adapted to any of them. These events have a common theme, the emergence of third world business practices that shift American style practices away from the business and on to the customer. Prime example, self-serve gas stations. Under American custom, people shop for the lowest price.
Now, the lowest price meant you get out of your car and pump your own gas. Sure, trivial in itself, but ir forces others to do the same. It established the practice of chipping away at service and brought America down to the lower standadrds of the third world. Slowly, but in a gnawing fashion. We saw the rise of the service contract, long check-out lines, help desks, free memberships, and things that in their own right were bullshit a generation earlier. Call your doctor, get a recording. Need a part, pay for it shipped overnight.
Businesses can no longer do what is best for the customer. They must do what costs the least as opposed to what produces the best results overall, or they will flounder. After an hour of driving around, JZ finally admitted all the local laundromats closed at the same time, 8PM. He gave up and we went to Scully’s, a pub out on 72nd, and chatted up women for a couple hours.
