From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XII

Introduction

This is the twelfth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, and Volume XI is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

“Bits and bobs” are little anecdotes from my letters and emails to friends and family, which comprised most of my writing before starting up this blog. The dispatches in this volume were to my brother Bryan, written when I was newly married and living in San Francisco. He was still living in our hometown of Boulder, Colorado. Here is a photo of the two of us from around the time I wrote these.

January 25, 1995

I bought the Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing program for DOS. (I call it “Mavis & Butthead.”) It was supposed to run on 560K of RAM, & they recommended a “meg.” Now this is really confusing: how much is a meg? I’ve heard it’s 640,000 bytes, but I’ve also heard it’s 1,000,000 bytes. Very confusing. Anyhow, it wouldn’t even run when installed, although I have a meg. I made a DOS bootable diskette with modified AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS files to get past its memory verification, and was therefore able to run it. However, it really was slow. I couldn’t make it keep up with me. I would type, “Mavis Beacon, your program stinks!” and on the screen I’d get, “Mvi Bn, yr pgm sk!” It was absurd, a total disaster. I took it back.

So, instead I bought this cheesy el cheapo Typing Tutor software. It only requires 512K of RAM; an IBM XT, AT, 286, 386 or higher; hard drive optional. Now that’s my kind of program. Its proudest feature is the Typing Lobster Sea Adventure game:

The Lobster Sea Adventure(TM) is an exciting game of chase and it’s an incredibly fast way to increase your typing accuracy and speed. Avoid being “pinched” by the lobster while typing in full sentences and using the shift keys. So many users have increased their typing speed and accuracy with the lobster and had fun at the same time!

Pretty much the most amazing video game ever. Not. 

Feb 1, 1995

Thanks for clearing up the meg issue. I grasp now that there is no standard. Say, that reminds me: at work I sent around these Computer Information Forms to get an inventory of what software people have, and what they want. I put a checkbox for “I need Microsoft Office” and another for “I only need Word.” On one form, an engineer had drawn in a new box and written “I need a new computer” and checked it. That inspired me. Our office manager (or “Director of Marketing and Administration,” a lofty title designed to boost her morale on the cheap) is using a petrified HP fossil called a Vectra. It’s so slow I made a special computer information form just for her; instead of having her fill in the RAM, ROM, MHz, CPU, etc. I just made one checkbox next to the text: “My computer is a tired, crippled old thing that barely runs anything at all. I’m surprised it doesn’t use 8-track tapes instead of diskettes. Somebody should just take it out and shoot it. But please, back it up first.” She put a huge check mark in that box. Alas, as it turns out nobody’s PC seems powerful enough to switch from WordPerfect to Word. Cash flow is too tight. We’ll all have to wait.

March 22, 1995

Things are pretty stressful at work. My boss, the company president, totally dissed me. He’d promised a paper to a magazine called the Inspectioneering Journal, but totally forgot to write it. At the last minute, realizing he had nothing to write, he kicked the project down to me, telling me to write a paper on Mechanical Integrity, on the double. I wrote one, in a huge rush, and I thought it came out pretty well … I even put in some neat visual things, like a table and a pie chart showing the types of issues discovered by OSHA during inspections. I sent the finished article to the journal’s editor for review; if it passed muster, he’d submit it to a panel of other editors for final approval. There wasn’t time to run it by my boss first—we were literally right against the deadline. Well, my boss read it after the fact, and totally bagged on it, freaking out that it would be torn apart by the editorial panel and this would make him look bad (since he was the alleged writer). He said I needed to extensively revise it immediately before the editor could pass it along. He didn’t say one positive thing about it.

One of my boss’s main demands was that I eliminate my entire introduction, which was an overview of OSHA’s Process Safety Management standard (upon which the guts of the paper were based). He also wanted the whole article put into the passive voice (e.g., “we determined” becomes “it was determined”) which of course violates one of the most fundamental principles of style. There were a few more nitpicky “corrections,” all of which were equally wrong. So, my morale being in the gutter, I just didn’t bother making any of the revisions and sending along a new version. I did call the editor and left him a voicemail saying, “With the benefit of hindsight we’ve determined that our initial paragraph may have been needless so I’d like to revise the paper before the panel review.” I didn’t hear back right away, but when I did, it was a message on my voice mail saying, “Well, I wanted to let you know that I got the paper and ... congratulations, you did a great job, it’s just perfect for our journal. I’m really impressed with the clarity of your writing and I am very excited about working with you on more projects. As for the introduction, I wouldn’t change a thing. It’s all appropriate. Further, I would like you to submit a photo of yourself along with the one of your company’s president, to accompany the article, since I’m listing you as a co-author.” Needless to say I feel totally vindicated. I’ve been leafing through The Joy of Cooking for a good crow recipe to give my boss. I need a low-cal one because he really ought to be eating this all the time.

April 27, 1995

You might remember my cool Benrus analog wristwatch with the fancy rotating bezel on it. I’ve known for well over a year that that ring is in fact kind of like a slide rule. Yesterday an engineer at work ripped it out of my hands when I showed it to him, and fairly drooled all over it. In the course of two or three minutes he demonstrated like twenty different calculations you can do with it. But “slide rule bezel” is confusing because it doesn’t slide and that doesn’t sound cool. So I call it the “hyper-alloy detonator depth-charge bezel.” The only problem is, it only rotates one way. Does that mean you can add but you can’t subtract? Multiply but not divide? Clearly I did not retain the engineer’s lesson; I only use the bezel to time parking meters, but rarely, and I usually forget I’ve used it and just go by sixth sense anyway. Besides, I don’t use parking meters that often, since I don’t have a car.

May 11, 1995

I can’t believe you actually complained about the poor bike racing coverage in the [Boulder] Daily Camera. You’ve got to be kidding me. That paper has the best racing coverage I’ve ever seen. We’re lucky to get a list of top ten results in the back pages of the Sunday sports section, next to the bowling results. I can get a little bit of information from CompuServe, the online information service, but my main source is forwarded messages from my friend who can get complete results from America On-Line, which has a Bicycling Magazine forum or some such thing.

October 29, 1995

On a cold, blustery day we went to the San Francisco Center and poked around. One of the things I looked at was a thick wool button-down shirt from Woolrich, just like the ones we all wore back in high school (and which are featured in our Four Brothers portrait that hangs proudly above my desk as I sit here typing).

Lo and behold, I did finally find some wool button-down shirts, but the price tag was staggering … close to $100. Just for a shirt! (Okay, a nice, thick one, but still.) You’ll certainly recall that we bought ours at the Factory Outlet in Broomfield, back when Factory Outlet meant slightly irregular and overstocked stuff that was really cheap, instead of what it means now (which is nothing more than a company-run store that sells only their brand of product and nobody else’s, for a price that is supposedly cheaper, but usually not by much). I’m sure there was something wrong with our Woolrich shirts, but I never could figure out what. A friend of mine back in high school once hit upon a theory: my shirt was defective because the front pockets didn’t have buttons. Well, they did: I just hadn’t buttoned them. So much for that. I have to wonder: now that factory outlet stores generally sell all first-quality stuff, what do companies do with their seconds? Surely they must have seconds. Do they just pitch it? Or do they pretend it’s fine and put some extra tag on there talking about how such variations give the garment character or something?

Finally I came upon some reasonably priced shirts but they looked really cheesy. I was lamenting the downfall of this once proud brand when I realized I’d drifted right out of Woolrich and into the Dockers store. I guess I’m just not cut out for shopping…

November 25, 1995

My job is slowing down somewhat. Now that I’ve given notice, I’ve been branded a treacherous backstabber, not to be trusted. I’m having my projects taken away from me and given to people who don’t know how to do them, which leads to these people tearing their hair out while they come up to speed. At least I’m around to help for a while. (“Like this,” I’ll tell them, grabbing a huge hunk of hair in both hands. “You want to tear as violently as possible.”) I’m also helping to interview the candidates for my replacement. This is good too, because I get to ask those probing questions: “You’re walking in the desert, and you see a tortoise flipped up on its back, its stomach baking in the hot sun. You could flip it back over, but you don’t … why is that?”

December 12, 1995

Well, I hope y’all had a good time at Dad’s birthday dinner. I talked to him today briefly. To have an excuse to keep the call short, I used a long-distance calling coupon that the cash register at Safeway spat out when I bought some gum. I dialed the 800 number and a recorded message said, “Thank you for buying Carefree gum at Safeway!” and gave me directions for entering my PIN, etc. The coupon was good for five minutes, which was really kind of strange because you feel like you can’t think of anything to say since you’re so hurried. I managed to remind Dad to reimburse me for Max’s b-day present; Dad had called me on Max’s birthday to say, “Give Max $50 for me and I’ll reimburse you.” But when I reminded him, he claimed he didn’t know what I was talking about. Could he be that scatterbrained? It was only three weeks ago! I’m trying to convince myself I haven’t just been scammed by my own dad.

December 12, 1996

Yeah, I know what you mean about web pages. I could make one using this CompuServe web page wizard, but what’s the point? The only reason I could think of is that by doing a search engine (i.e., AltaVista) search, a long-lost friend could find me. But I got no friends.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XI

Introduction

This is the eleventh installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, and Volume X is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

Before the blogosphere, I didn’t have any audience for my random ramblings except friends and family whom I emailed. Now, I can be largely ignored by five billion people at once instead of just one at a time! O brave new world!

The dispatches below are from ancient emails to my brother G—, when I was newly married and living in San Francisco. He was (and is) living in the Netherlands. Here is a photo of the two of us from around the time I wrote these.

March 4, 1995

I heard from B— about your computer woes. I’m kind of afraid to buy a computer, because the technology gets outdated so quickly. But then again, I only need a simple machine for my needs, except my hard drive is almost full and certain things run slowly. And I really think I’d rather use a different typing tutorial program for learning Dvorak; I mean, the Typing Lobster is cool and all, but the more sophisticated typing software could probably better teach the Dvorak layout. My computer is a 386 running at a scant 16 MHz, with only a single meg of RAM. But it is a 386, darn it, and I could always add RAM. For that matter, I could replace the hard drive. It’s the motherboard that’s a mother to replace. Hence the name, perhaps. Motherboard. What a cool word. I’ll bet every computer nerd gets a little rush when he has the opportunity to use “motherboard” in a sentence. He pauses momentarily for buildup, looks his pal in the eye, and says, “Goddammit, Ralph, we need to slap in a whole new motherboard. Shit.” Then he breaks into a grin, because I’m sure that for a computer geek, replacing the motherboard is like overhauling a nice road bike is for us.

Work is busy, but not too bad and something really cool just happened: our office manager quit, and I got her office! It’s a great office. Fantastic view from 22 floors up. Plus, I have a door I can close when I hold important meetings (which are rare, I admit). More importantly, once I’ve been given an office, I’ll never have to go back to that stupid half-high cubicle, and my colleagues are bound to have more professional respect for a Man with an Office than for a Guy with a Space. Our controller lauded my move, saying, “Big day for the big D … goin’ from the doghouse to the penthouse!”

April 12, 1995

Had a real scare tonight. We went out to Chinese with E— and her niece, S— who is a freshman in high school and spending spring break with us. We found a really good place, the R&G lounge (recommended highly by a Chinese woman we met in a dime store). The place had good food, and a funny fortune (“Be tactful; overlook not your own opportunity,” like who else’s are we gonna overlook?), and pretty good service. The waitress was dumbfounded, though, when S— asked for sugar for her tea. S— has a real sweet tooth: I found an empty frosting tub in our recycling, for example … but I digress. Anyhow, I did a terribly irresponsible thing: you know that beautiful multicolor umbrella that you gave us for Christmas? Well, I accidently left it behind after our meal! I didn’t realize my error until we were already all the way over in North Beach, and it was 10 PM. Needless to say I sprinted back to the R&G Lounge, running for all I was worth, but got there after the place had closed. I hammered on the door; no luck. I ran around back and hammered on the back door; still no response. But I couldn’t face the loss, so I just kept pounding. It was a glass door, so I couldn’t use my foot; just kept rapping with my knuckles, which got sorer all the time. Finally somebody appeared, and let me in. He seemed a bit disappointed that I’d returned for the umbrella, which he did go find for me. He declared, “I thought that umbrella would be my souvenir!” I’m so glad I got it back. I can go on living.

April 26, 1995

I got your e-mail bemoaning the staggering $100 price tag for Levi’s blue jeans over there in Holland, and am excited to help you out. Since you haven’t indicated whether you needed Levi’s blue jeans in particular, I went to the Gap over the weekend to see if they had any sales. No luck on discounted jeans, but I ended up blowing $85 on a few groovy linen shirts. So it wasn’t all for naught.

Well, yesterday on my lunch break I went to Banana Republican and looked around. At first it didn’t look promising, but then I found a section with some discounted jeans. The only problem was, the sizing seemed strange. They had sizes like 34R and 34L; I figured out it meant regular and long, but how regular? how long? I asked the clerk and she said regular was 32” inseam, long was 34”. The weird sizing was in fact why they were on sale: because the sizes didn’t make sense, and nobody understood them, and BR has now gone to a two-number system like everybody else, and have to blow out all the jeans under the old sizing system. So I found some that had little stickers over the “34L” that said “34/34.” I guess that was an unsuccessful solution to the problem.

I couldn’t find any in 36” length but tried on some 34s, and they fit well. I didn’t have E— there to verify that the jeans have that uncanny ability to turn even the most homely guy into a sex symbol, but the length, anyway, was fine. I asked a clerk and she said they always did run long. (Didn’t ask her about the sex symbol thing.) Anyway, I bought three pairs—two for you and one for me. I was tempted to buy more. These aren’t Levi’s, mind you, but they’re called the Ranch Hand cut, which is a relaxed jean.

I should pause here to explain some of the clothing nomenclature to you. If something is cheap and quotidian, it typically has a plural name, e.g. pants, jeans, sunglasses. However, if it is very expensive and chic, it gets a singular name, e.g. “a nice pant,” “a relaxed jean,” “a sophisticated sunglass.” I’ve actually heard sales clerks say that. “These are cheap jeans.” “That’s a nice pant.” Very sophisticated language.

So anyway, these are a relaxed jean. (Staggering grammatical implications here.) Button fly. Made in USA. 100% Cotton Denim. Inspected by #27. Preshrunk. Stonewashed. (Not acid-washed … remember that heinous 80’s teen indoor mall look?) I am told these jean will not shrink more than 1/4” unless you routinely dry them on high heat, in which case they will shrink up to 1/2” over the months. The price? Well . . . $58.00. Ouch. But cheaper than Levi’s in Holland, right? Oh, wait . . . that’s not the sale price. The sale price was a mere $39. Sure, you can get jeans for less—but not a jean! Significant savings. But you know, that apparently wasn’t enough to move these cursed improperly sized jean, for a second sale tag, overlapping the original just slightly, listed the price at an even lower $29.99! Okay, now we’re talking! That’s almost half price! So I’m certain you’ll agree that such a fine jean are well worth $30.

But you know, even with the “34/34” sticker firmly placed over the godforsaken “34L,” the second sale price still wasn’t enough to get these things off the floor and into the wardrobes of San Francisco. Nothing less than a third tag brought the price down even further, all the way down to $19.99! Now, you can’t even get Sears Toughskins for that. For that price, maybe you could do a cheesy pair of off-brand seconds at Ross Dress for Less, stamped “IMPERFECT,” with the crotch sewn in backwards or something like that. But no, we’re talking the Ranch Hand Relaxed Jean. Amazing.

So I’ll send them out. If anybody out there in Holland questions the rich American heritage of Banana Republican, or in any way insinuates that Levi’s are cooler, just say something like, “Well, yeah, sure, Levi’s are great jeans . . . but these are a pant.” (Is your Dutch good enough to communicate such subtleties?)

May 10, 1995

Well, it’s 10:00pm and I still have to ride. The weather’s been crappy so I’ve been riding my Blackburn Mag Turbo trainer. I got a flat tire on it last night. Go figure. Then, when I was hunting for a spare tube in my toolbox, I suffered a freak accident. Remember the trophy from my Burrito Eating World Championship? It had this giant wooden base with an engraved brass plaque, with my name and everything, and then a giant spring-type shock absorber with the shimmering silver burrito atop it. Well, I don’t know if you ever learned what sad fate befell that trophy, so I’ll tell you. Months after the big burrito race, throughout which time the trophy had enjoyed prominent placement on our apartment’s coffee table, I had a fit of pique (unrelated to the trophy, probably over some girl or something) and suddenly grabbed the trophy, jumped up from the sofa, ran out the front door to the railing overlooking our parking lot, and threw the trophy over the edge. The shock absorber exploded on impact, if memory serves (though this is exactly the kind of detail I’d embellish, I confess). My roommate C— cheered wildly because he’d gotten sick of looking at the trophy. Well, I regretted my recklessness immediately, but of course there was nothing to be done for the trophy. I did pry off the engraved plaque, though, and kept it as, well, a trophy I guess you could say. Anyway, last night (as I was starting to tell you before that grand diversion) I was rifling through my toolbox, on a shelf in a closet, and dislodged the trophy plaque, which fell from a height of four feet or so. It hit my bare leg just above the ankle, causing a huge gash which bled profusely. So what do you think … was this karmic retribution?

December 23, 1996

Mom’s down here for Christmas, which is nice. It’s been raining like crazy here, but today it went from cloudy to a clear blue sky in a span of like five minutes. So E—, Mom & I decided to go for a walk, and popped into various shops to poke around. We found this neat bowl at a place just down the street from our apartment, at a little shop called Jade Snow Wong. Jade Snow Wong is the name of the owner; she’s also a creator of ceramics and a writer of nonfiction, and Mom read one of her books when she was in high school! Anyway, this bowl is just the perfect shape. It’s weird, but holding it, cupping it in your palms, brings about a really soothing feeling. So we bought it; it was like $6. We walked all around Chinatown and bought some really weird stuff. Like this really fancy soap, in a colored paper wrapper with a gold seal and everything, the kind of soap that would cost like $5 a bar in our neighborhood; four for a dollar there. We also bought this really strange Ginseng chewing gum. It smells, and tastes, like over-sweetened dirt. I’d thought it might give me a buzz, but no dice. Remember that bean drink we bought once in Chinatown, that was so sickeningly cloyingly sweet, and how the cashier laughed and laughed when we drank it because we couldn’t keep from making faces?

Anyway, we eventually ended up at House of Nanking, and had a typically great meal. The owner, Peter Fang, was there, as usual, working in every capacity you can imagine from host to waiter to cook. You remember meeting him, right? He’s always got this boyish smile on his face, and doesn’t seem in the least bit intimidated by the culture gap, if there still is one, between himself and his customers. He stopped at the bar where we were eating and asked if the scallops were delicious. (Of course they were.) Then he asked, with a slight smirk, if we were going to Macy’s afterwards, and we said no. He said, feigning surprise, “You’ve already bought everything?”

 “We did buy some things,” I laughed. He looked totally interested as I dragged out the bag with the soap in it, and he watched eagerly as I unwrapped it, then laughed his ass off when he saw what we bought. “Let me guess, four for a dollar?” he asked. I said yes. Then I handed him the bowl, but he neglected to cup it properly and thus fully appreciate it. “Uh, four-fifty,” he guessed. “No, six,” I said. He giggled and either said, “You got taken” (which I actually kind of doubt) or simply had the expression that said we got taken. “But we didn’t buy this in Chinatown, we bought it in Russian Hill,” E— explained. “Oh, oh,” he nodded, understanding completely.

We also had their chow mein, which has even ropier noodles than the Gondolier in Boulder, but is great (and cheap, $3.30!). Perhaps the most exciting thing we ate was this Eggplant Szechwan Style, which had the normal green pea pods but also this brilliant, I mean absolutely electric, purple eggplant, of course in a spicy sauce with lots of garlic. It was the loudest looking Chinese dish I’ve ever ordered, and delicious. I asked if it was made from a special eggplant. It was a “young Chinese” eggplant, Mr. Fang said. When they get older they lose some of their quality, he explained, and become less tender. It dawned on me that you can eat the young eggplant without any of the guilt you may feel when eating veal.

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume X

Introduction

This is the tenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume IX is here. (The different volumes have little or nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last few installments, these are taken from ancient emails, back when I archived them as simple text files in the mistaken belief I’d be able to keep up with the practice. It didn’t last long, but has yielded some fun finds from a bygone era. I wrote all these when I was living in San Francisco, before moving to the burbs and becoming a parent.

December 26, 1994

[Having recently finished a 9-month bike tour] I’m still interviewing for a proper corporate-type job. In the meantime I’ve been working odd shifts at the bike shop in Berkeley, just to feel like I’m not a totally hopeless unemployed person. It’s a pretty ridiculous commute, first biking up and over California Street which has got to be at least a 15% grade, and then all the way under the bay on the Bart, for the typically paltry pay you get at a bike shop. Still, it’s diverting and often fun. For example, on Christmas Eve, a bike builder named Daniel, who has been on suspension without pay until further notice for sloppy work, brought in a 12-pack of Heineken, probably as a brown-nosing move. We threw it in the fridge, and brainstormed ways to get the owner, M—, to let us drink them on the job. M— was in a holiday mood, which was good; earlier, I’d “reminded” him of a policy of always buying lunch for members of the staff who wore staff t-shirts on Christmas Eve, and he went along with it. Well, by mid-afternoon the mad Christmas crowds were getting to me and the boys, and I proposed to M— the idea of discreet alcohol consumption to carry us through. M— said, “What, there’s beers!? Cool, gimme one.” Alas, it appeared we’d have no way to open them, lacking a bottle opener, but I grabbed a Maillard Helicomatic lock-ring tool and it worked great. In fact, it soon dawned on me that one half of the tool does the lock-ring, and the other is in fact nothing else but a bottle opener. You gotta love the French. Well, M— proceeded to walk out on the sales floor, beer in hand, and sell a bike. Needless to say it was a free-for-all after that.

January 1, 1995

I guess I forgot to give you my (kinda) new street address: it’s below. I had some fun moving in here. Our street is fairly flat, but our-cross street, Filbert, is crazy steep. They don’t call our neighborhood Russian Hill for nothing; our hills are as oppressive as Russia herself. Trucks and tour buses are prohibited on Filbert but that didn’t stop me from driving up it in the 14-foot U-Haul I rented. Its diesel engine was taxed to the limit, and I had this breathtaking, terrifying, yet oddly giddy feeling of impending doom. Halfway up—and too late to turn around—my inner ear started giving me (non-verbal) warning messages that the truck was about to pitch over backwards and tumble down the hill, end over end. It was such a fearsome feat that I almost got an erection. I held my breath and reassured myself with the fact that this time, I’d bought the full insurance. Anyhow, I made it over, down the other side on compression (the engine shrieking like it was gonna throw a rod), and then, as a final flourish, proceeded to parallel-park that baby in one of the toughest neighborhoods for parking in the entire city.

March 13, 1995

I am very gratified to get your response. The kind of honesty I indulged in via my letter to you, calling you out as I did, was admittedly dangerous—the recipient of such a letter can either take the painful, self-effacing route (which you did), or delude himself and continue to hide behind the falsity of his social veneer. This latter type, like a blindfolded tyke who has yet to learn object permanence, will assume that because he can’t see the truth, that it can’t see him. Of course such behavior is completely pathological. Right now I’m thinking of J— S—, whose insatiable desire to be cooler than me back in high school took the form of dissing me, like some kind of human sacrifice to the gods of cool. I thought to myself, “J—, can’t you do better than that? It’s not hard to be cooler than me—why don’t you try to be cooler than somebody who actually is cool? Like the Fonz? I mean, seriously … cooler than me? What kind of ambition is that?” I was originally drawn to J— as a friend, back in elementary school, because he was such a bold, unapologetic nerd. Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Through what he probably thought was a social apotheosis from lowly dork into “happening dude” (his favorite phrase), I witnessed the slow, cancerous death of a personality.

May 2, 1995

Thanks for the warning about the virus! I’ve always wondered whether those anti-virus programs can detect viruses that come over e-mail. Fortunately, almost all my e-mail comes from trusted friends and relatives anyway. I did, however, receive a “junk mail” message at work. I guess business solicitations are frowned upon on the Internet, but on CompuServe [how I get and send e-mail], who knows, maybe anything goes. Anyway, I forwarded your warning message to everybody in my e-mail list (about 20 people).

So, yeah, e-mail sure is cool. It’s been wonderful to be able to write my brother Geoff without waiting for the normal three weeks or so it takes the postal service to carry physical mail to the Netherlands. Maybe I’ll get a sound card for my PC and record my actual voice, and send the recording as a binary file; Geoff could hear a reasonable computer facsimile of my voice on the other end! Of course that would be more of a parlor trick than anything useful. You know, the strangest thing about e-mail is that my dad, who by all means ought to be a master of this technology, has not actually joined up. And yet he has the computer, and the mind, for it. Bizarre.

August 6, 1995

You know what? Every time I make my Mexican rice, I think of the time I made it at your place in NYC, and scorched it. The horror! I am certain that you threw away the leftover rice, because it was, well, inedible. I only hope you didn’t have to throw away the pot since I’d blackened it so badly. I keep thinking about what a disaster that was. I say all this to my shame. I guess what I’m saying is, you should really come out to San Francisco so that I can try again with the rice, and show you that it really is good when the right ingredients and familiar kitchen equipment are on hand. I could send you back with a new pot, even. So if you get the chance, please come. Until then, I suppose you can just curse my name.

October 24, 1995

Using the formula f=mgh, and my stopwatch and altimeter data, I have calculated my power output for the climbs I biked up today: over a period of 16:30, I averaged 0.37 horsepower. But what does that mean? Does it mean I have a third of the strength of a horse? Well, not really; I don’t think horsepower applies to horses in the real world. But we do use horsepower to describe certain things. For example, my output was .0037 times the horsepower of a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, I happen to know. And it would be more than enough to power a Hoover Mighty Might vacuum cleaner. If that’s not interesting to you, consider that 0.37 horsepower translates into 272 watts. That tells us my output is enough to power one of our chandeliers and a desk lamp.

November 1, 1995

Why yes, I’ve been to House of Nanking many times, and thanks for asking. I guess I can’t really recall what my favorite dishes are there, as I try to mix it up each time. Until recently, my strategy was to spend my time in line asking everybody else what they usually get. But the last time, I was in the mood for chow fun and asked the waiter, who is also the owner, if they had it. (In my experience, you can ask for just about anything, including chili mac, at a Chinese restaurant and they’ll have it, even if it’s not on the menu. Not that I have ever actually asked for chili mac. I’m just sayin’.) Well, the owner looked at me as if I were some kind of uncultured rube (which I may well be). “No, chow fun is white-man food!” he laughed. “This your first time here?” I said, “Uh … no.” He nodded and said, “I’ll set you up.” What then transpired you can well imagine, as you described your own Nanking dining experience so well in your last epistle … I need say nothing more. I love that place. It’s always worth the wait. I like the strange vegetables that they use—yams, for example. Totally unique (plus I normally hate yams). As far as the place being greasy, sure, it’s greasy, as Chinese food tends to be, but compared to most places, it goes down (and stays down) pretty darn well. Man. Now I can’t get that place off my mind.

August 27, 1996

How cool, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my boom box. It works great—so it looks like I bought computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies that E— got from her work. I guess I could check out CDs from the library and tape them. Or of course I could do like everyone else and just go to the record store and buy music, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house one day, which is no easy feat in this area. We looked at a 2-bedroom condo a few doors down and it’s $250,000! There are 1-bedroom condos on top of Russian Hill for $1 million … as if! Sausalito is probably only slightly cheaper than San Francisco, and we’d have to pay $3 a day to commute in over the Golden Gate Bridge (not to mention fighting the traffic … no thanks). So we have to be pretty frugal while we figure out where, one day, we might be able to afford a place.

December 2, 1996

Just had the stomach flu. As if in some awful parody of the three-squares-a-day rule, I deposited my Thanksgiving dinner, in three installments, into the toilet (out the front end). Damn!

December 23, 1996

In reply to your question:

>>You’re set in Internet EtheReal Estate, hottest property going 
>>(the new frontier). But still one question: where do you put 
>>the relatives when they come to visit?

Well, it’s really pretty BASIC. First, I should say that my family members aren’t exactly queuing up to visit me. But when one or two of these characters feels the need to offload, I’m happy to let them nest in any free partition in my home. I help download their luggage (we have a little cache to store any valuables they might have). If they stay the night, I have a strange kind of cot I fashioned out of a kind of braided fiber (a web, you might say) that I’ve stretched over a mainframe. I have a nice spreadsheet for the cot, and some other soft wares, to make guests as comfortable as possible. Usually I keep the bedding compressed, but sometimes I set it up just for CIX and floppy down on it myself.

I’d really like to keep my domain open, but I normally limit it to friends and family. I mean, entertaining is a real effort for me—I guess I’m just not a natural-born server. Multi-tasking is hard for me so I just can’t monitor everyone all the time. I struggle to be a good host sometimes, and some guests I don’t like the slightest bit. Most are basically OK, but many just don’t observe the proper protocol. I can handle it if they’re not PC, but I won’t tolerate bad language. In fact, the next time I get a cursor, he’d better be ready to run, because I swear I’ll boot him!

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume VIII

Introduction

This is the eighth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, and Volume VII is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another.)

As with the last installment, these are taken from emails, back when I archived them as simple text files so that one day, when I was a celebrity blogger, I could mine them for tasty nuggets that would thrill my readers without requiring me to write anything new. How prescient, since the Internet was just getting started and blogs were not yet a thing…

March 14, 1995

The [HP] Vectra [computer] is still down at work. I found the setup disks and ran setup to check the CMOS settings. They were all okay; I don’t know what the problem is. I called tech support and when they heard what year the computer was, they said, “Oh, you’ll have to get in touch with our HP Classics department. The only problem is, the old geezers we’ve got down there can’t always hear the phone ringing.” Actually, I made that last part up. But there really is an HP Classics department, and they really don’t answer their phone.

May 10, 1995

I was in the company president’s office the other day having a big important one-on-one meeting, and the phone rang. The big boss got embroiled in a conversation, and you know, I’ve always really hated that. Am I just supposed to sit there in his office, contentedly watching him as he talks and as he twirls his hair around his finger in little curlicues that eventually match the phone cord, which is all twisted from his endless pacing? No way could I do that. But could I just leave? No—any motion towards the door and the boss is frantically gesturing for me to stay. What do I do? So I idly picked up three company-logo-embossed golf balls off of his desk and began juggling. And, sure enough, I dropped one, and it began rolling across the floor, and just when I was on my hands and knees retrieving it (in my $500 suit, of course) the boss got off the phone. I casually put the golf balls back on his desk and we continued our conversation. He didn’t seem fazed, so I guess he’s used to my behavior—and that can’t be a good sign. Will I ever grow up? It reminds me of how you got in trouble for your rubber-band fights at your first job out of college. You’ve really been an inspiration to me, you know.

January 6, 1996

I got a voicemail from my old boss, from [the job I’d quit about a month before]. He said the Vectra, which is the shared hallway computer, had crashed, and he had no idea what to do. They’re in a panic because it’s the only computer with CompuServe access. I had to laugh. I’d been warning people for months that the computer was showing signs of a bad CMOS battery and that its days were numbered. I even put a sign on it saying “Don’t turn me off or I’ll die.” Well, they should have listened. Asking for help now is like saying, “Well, the house burned to the ground. The fire department just finishing hosing things down. Did you say something a while back about smoke detectors?”

January 28, 1996

[To my brother Geoff] … I’ve been thinking lately about our Murray Street Station [San Luis Obispo] days. I still have that original microwave oven, and even one of those big plastic lidded pitchers we used to keep the refried beans in. Remember that awful Thanksgiving dinner at Sizzler? Man, those were the days. Remember all the Canadian-bacon-and-pineapple pizzas K— [the bike shop owner] used to buy us? And how great it was to get free pizza, but how sick we were of that variety? Like, it would be petty and annoying to complain, and yet we’d like pepperoni and mushroom so much better? I actually oddly miss those factory days, too. Sure, the work wasn’t so fun but I became fond of our routine, like how we’d stop at that grocery store (what was it called? Willie Bros, yeah, that’s it) and get Snickers bars to console ourselves because of the brutal cold wind facing us all the way home, every night? And how we used to rent videos at that one place 24/7 because the clerk was so fly? And the Lady Lee Deluxe Chocolate Fudge Brownie Supreme ice cream we’d split, just sawing the half-gallon carton down the middle? And all that cake? And our pushup and sit-up regimen, that made you so buff but never did anything for me? Man, I kinda miss those days.

February 9, 1996

Please retransmit your last email, with the attached article, in some other form than MIME (whatever that is), if possible. Or maybe you could use OCR to convert the article to plain ASCII text? Hmmm . . . I’m not sure Apple computers do ASCII. Or, you could fax the article to my computer, except I have no idea how to set it up to receive faxes, nor do I want to leave it turned on all the time. Then there’s the problem of screwing something up so that the fax answers the regular phone and deafens the hapless caller with its shrieking session-handshake protocol. (My modem came with voice-mail software, too, but I don’t think I want to mess with that, either.) Basically, I’ve got more computing power than a third world country, and no desire to use most of it.

April 24, 1996

We were in L.A. last weekend for a book festival, and Ray Bradbury and Geoffrey Wolff were both speaking. The lines for both were quite long and we worried we wouldn’t get in to either one. Wolff’s seminar, called “Memoirs,” seemed like the slightly less popular one and I thought I might have a better chance of getting into that, but it would mean giving up my spot in the Bradbury line. When I complained about my dilemma, one of the other people waiting in the line said, “Yeah, that’s a tough decision: you’ve gotta choose between the past and the future!”

I was doing my Marin Headlands loop today and I caught up to a pretty fit looking mountain biker. I passed him, and he immediately passed me back, and started hammering. I sat, bored, on his wheel for a while (it was pretty steep so I wasn’t getting too much benefit from drafting) and eventually I decided he was going too slow, and I passed him again. Well, this incited him further, and he took the lead again and started really jamming. Well, woe be to me, he simply rode me off his wheel. On a damn mountain bike! Knobby tires and everything! Man, that was humbling. I just couldn’t keep up. He took some time out of me, too, and finished the climb well ahead. Well, I was encumbered further by a couple of cars on the descent that followed, but on the next climb I blew by him. I was going so hard he couldn’t even get my wheel. I continued to hammer and basically never saw him again. I know they say he who laughs last laughs best, but still . . . he who is laughed at is still laughed at. Man.

June 18, 1996

With regard to your inquiry about bike frame geometry, I doubt there’s anything shallow about your Guerciotti’s head tube angle. My Guerciotti is the same model and only like a year older, and its head angle is like 74 degrees! Yours might be a bit more shallow than mine because it’s a smaller frame, and because you have a smaller penis than I do, but still, I’d expect it to be at least 73 degrees. In any case, this should have almost nothing to do with the way the bike climbs. What do you mean, the front wheel is “slow to move”? As far as I know, the only motion you want is for it to roll. And if it’s rolling too slowly, I would think that’s a fitness problem on your part. (The only other time I’ve heard somebody complain of something like this was when I sold my wife’s would-be-ex-stepmother-in-law a Bianchi and she said it handled “like a cow” when she got out of the saddle. We isolated the problem: low pressure in the front tire.) Anyhow, my Team Miyatas, all three of them, had shallow (73 degree) head angles and they seemed to climb just fine. Actually, they climbed like shit because they were heavy, but I had no problem per se with getting the front wheel to rotate.

June 30, 1996

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
ALBERT ON NATIONAL TELEVISION

HERTOGENBOSCH, THE NETHERLANDS: American television audiences received a long-overdue treat today: Geoff Albert, one of the finest looking young individuals the free world has ever produced, graced the airwaves with several seconds of his normally elusive presence.

The footage occurred during routine coverage of the Tour de France bicycle race on ESPN, an American sports network. No sooner had Stage One coverage of the race begun than the camera panned over Albert—not just his face, but his entire body as well. The camera, held by a motorcycle-mounted cameraman, was giving a racer’s-eye view of the course, and thousands of screaming, hand-waving fans struggled to get into the picture. However, when the motorcycle approached Albert, it found him strangely aloof from the rest of the crowd—somehow closer to the road, and totally unobstructed. In the nonchalant style of someone accustomed to the spotlight, Albert made no move to draw the cameraman’s attention. He simply stood there, hands thrust in his back pockets, Pentax camera hanging around his neck … the very image of nonchalance. As the motorcycle passed him, his eyes tracked the camera. As an estimated 1 billion people watch Tour de France coverage worldwide, and the footage is the same across TV networks, so it is expected that millions of female viewers were instantly, and irrevocably, smitten. Also likely is that many millions of men grumbled enviously. One thing is certain: for those fleeting moments, nobody was thinking about the bicycle race.

Why Albert was so calm and unimpressed by his moment of glory is simple to understand: he is no stranger to celebrity, and would consider this episode more of a gift to viewers than to himself. Less easy to understand is why Albert commanded such a large spectating area in the otherwise totally packed sidelines. His twin brother Bryan, an expert on such matters, speculates that “Geoff probably forgot to wear his deodorant today.” Such an oversight is not hard to imagine; after all, both of the Albert twins have earned quite a reputation over the years for their casual approach to hygiene.

Network spokesmen predict that those precious few moments of footage will boost ESPN’s ratings and help secure many more years of cycling coverage on the network. Meanwhile, journalists everywhere are speculating that this year’s coverage is well on the way to winning numerous awards for its shrewd camera work.

Albert was unavailable for comment. And, with the Tour moving to Belgium tomorrow, it is unlikely that viewers will be given an encore. With three more weeks of racing ahead, it’s entirely possible that the racers, not this sole spectator, will begin to command the attention of sports aficionados. But for today, Geoff’s televised moment is the hottest news in cycling.

August 24, 1996

Wow, I just figured out how to hook the CD-ROM in my computer into my normal stereo. It works great—so it looks like I bought those new computer speakers for nothing. Oh well. Now I can play CDs, which I never could before. Only problem is, I only own two CDs and they were both freebies E— got from her work. I guess I can check out CDs from the library and tape them. (Of course I could buy some, but E— and I are trying to save up for a house, which is no easy thing to buy around here.)

December 17, 1996

At our company holiday party we had a “white elephant” gift exchange whereby you wrap up something that you don’t want, that somebody gave you as a gift, or that you can’t believe you ever bought, and you bring it in and put it on a table. Then everybody draws a number and the person with #1 chooses first. Now, #2 gets to either choose a gift or take #1’s gift instead (meaning that #1 gets to choose again). I brought this large cheese holder, ceramic, that’s basically a plate with a 4-inch tall cylindrical cover that goes over it, so you can store cheese at room temperature. It said “CHEESE” on it. E—’s mom gave it to us and E— never did like it. The person who got it, our receptionist, was totally stoked, I could tell. (She said later she was in total suspense the whole evening, hoping that nobody would take it away from her.) I stole our other receptionist’s Martinelli’s sparkling cider. The look on her face was one of absolute shock and unbridled grief. She was devastated. (It was one of the first gift takeovers of the day.) I felt so bad, I decided I’d offer to trade her later. She ended up with a pair of Christmas mugs, one shaped like a reindeer head and the other like a Frosty the Snowman head. They were just too hideous and she looked crestfallen all over again. I told her, “Look, I’m not willing to trade gifts, but I would like to just give you my Martinelli’s. The look on your face ... it was like I ran over your dog.” She insisted that I keep the cider; then, minutes later, the director of the entire western region (who got a Mag-lite, the lucky guy) reappeared after a brief absence: he’d gone out and bought the receptionist a replacement bottle of cider. Disaster narrowly averted. I hope my hostile takeover wasn’t career-limiting.

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From the Archives - Radio Station Poetry

Introduction

It’s a slow news day at albertnet so here’s another poem from my archives, complete with all-new footnotes. This one goes way back to spring 1988, after high school but during my year off before starting college. I was working as a receptionist at a radio station in San Luis Obispo, which was a really easy job ... most of the time.

Radio Poetry – Spring 1988

OPERATOR ERROR

I went to print a lame computer file,

A task that rarely causes any strain.                                 2

But this time it’s become a real trial

Because my finger has betrayed my brain.

I pushed the wrong damn key, or so it seems,

Which set disaster into motion quick.                              6

Deleting files hurts my self-esteem;

And I’ve just done it, with one finger flick.

Of course a backup file isn’t there:

Erasing it, another of my feats.                                        10

And my mistake caught everybody’s glare;

I botched the job by trying to be neat.

     I’m glad my job seems still to be intact;

     But that move wasn’t helpful, that’s a fact!               14

Footnotes and commentary

Letterhead: Class FM

Yes, this radio station was actually called “Class FM.” As you can see, the call letters were KLZZ, which was the manager’s second choice because he couldn’t get KLAS. (Maybe KLAS breaks some arcane FCC rule.) As receptionist I was required to answer the phone, “Good evening, you’ve got Class!” The deejays gave me a hard time about that. In fact, one of them was bored once and swooped by my desk to snatch up the ringing phone before I could, and answered, “Good evening, you’ve got gas! I mean Class!”

The competing radio station in our moldy oldies genre, US 98, had the slogan “Rocking the Central Coast with hits, we’re US 98!” There was a standing dare among our deejays to actually say, on the air, “Hitting the Central Coast with rocks, we’re Class FM!”

Line 1: went to print

Though this is obviously a pretty lousy poem, I like the internal rhyme in the phrase “went to print.” I wish the rest of the poem matched this strong start.

Line 1: lame computer file

Of course a computer file can’t be lame, exactly, but I was a teenager, so “lame” was naturally one of my favorite words. (I’ve just checked in with one of my resident teenagers and she says “lame” isn’t used that often nowadays ... it’s reserved for special cases because “it’s like the ultimate insult.”)

Computers weren’t quite so ubiquitous back then. I think there were only one or two of them in the whole radio station. This was long before most teenagers (outside of a few nerds) did anything on a computer, so the station manager assumed I would be unable to operate ours. He was  astonished to learn that I not only knew WordStar, but could even type fast. I’m not saying he was impressed, exactly, but I think he found my rare skills kind of cute.

Line 2: causes any strain

Word processors didn’t do a whole lot back then, so using them was a breeze. The hard part of my job was keeping busy. The only reason I even had the job is that this radio station was located inside a mall, and the mall rules required that all businesses be open and staffed during mall hours, which ended at 9:00 p.m. My shift therefore started when the daytime office manager’s shift ended at 5 p.m. On those days that the main staff left on time, I could relax, but when they were milling around I had to look busy. This was a challenge because there was almost nothing for me to do there. There was barely enough work for the office staff. It was a new station and just finding its footing.

You know what did cause strain? When the station president got drunk. He had a sizeable wine collection in his office (which the deejays said was highly unusual, alcohol being traditionally banned from radio stations for obvious reasons). This guy had serious personal issues, and when he got drunk  he got mean. His favorite drunken activity was to chew my head off for “abusing the position” by “studying on the job.” My standard defense—“Sir, I’m not even a student!”—fell on deaf ears. Once the deejay rescued me by calling me into the broadcast room: “Dana, come in here, we’re about to do a contest!” This ruse amazingly did work; the president failed to grasp that I ran the contests (i.e., took the ninth caller) right from my desk.

Speaking of strain, those contests really were pretty  tricky. The deejay would announce the contest, my phone would light up, and I’d have to blow off the first eight callers very quickly to have the ninth caller queued up in time to transfer him or her to the deejay’s phone, so this lucky winner could be on the air receiving the prize. Sometimes I’d get flustered and accidently disconnect the winner, meaning I’d have to take the next (i.e., tenth) caller to transfer in to the deejay. In this case both the ninth and tenth callers would get the prize, but the ninth caller would be furious about missing that little bit of radio fame.

The other problem was if too few people called in, and I’d be anxiously willing the phone to ring again so we’d actually have a winner. It’s embarrassing to recall how long it took me to figure out that callers had no way of knowing where their call actually fell in the onslaught, meaning I could say whatever I wanted. I could tell the first caller, “Congratulations, you’re the ninth caller!” and transfer him or her into the deejay, then get rid of all the other callers, perhaps telling each and every one of them, “Sorry, you’re the eighth caller.”

Line 3: it’s become

Glaring verb tense mismatch here. Heaven will take note.

Line 4: my finger

I’m not sure which finger this would have been. To save and exit from a WordStar document you typed Control-K and then X. To exit without saving changes you typed Control-K and then Q. So really, two fingers betrayed my brain: my ring finger that failed to type X, and my pinkie that typed Q. But neither of these would actually delete the file unless I hadn’t saved it at all. Who knows how I screwed this up. How lame is that: in a sprawling 14-line poem I failed to properly document the failure mode so as to learn from my mistake.

Line 6: set disaster into motion quick

It’s a good thing I was hired on as a receptionist, not a poet. This line is just plain embarrassing. Deleting the file was almost instantaneous. There was no disaster to “set into motion.” One second the file existed, and the next it didn’t. And a “disaster”? Please. It’s not like I had done a bunch of research or composed a precious manuscript. Whatever that file was, it could just be retyped. Sure, this might take time, but as I said, I had gobs of time. Nothing but time.

Line 7: self-esteem

Now this is just plain laziness. I needed a word that rhymed with “seems,” and blithely landed on “self-esteem” without any concern for accuracy. I was not some emo kid, let me assure you. Hell, emo hadn’t even been invented yet. I cannot fathom why I even bothered to write this sonnet if I wasn’t going to even try to make it good. In fact, I’ll bet in the next ten seconds I could write a better line. “I turned my day into a dreadful dream.” That’s better. Of course, the original eighth line no longer follows so I’ll have to rewrite it, too: “I screwed the pooch with just one finger flick.” There.

Line 10: Erasing it, another of my feats

I half-wish I could say I made up  this part solely to add a line or two to the sonnet. But in fact, I actually had deleted the backup file. Unless you’re an old guy like me, you probably won’t remember a time when disk space was considered valuable and something worth conserving. The 5¼-inch floppy disks we used back then held precious little data: 160 KB, which is 1/25000th the capacity of the 4-GB micro-SD cards that I happen to have a whole Ziploc baggie of. (Imagine a stack of 25,000 of those 5¼-inch floppies, holding the same amount of data as a thumbnail-sized card!) I filled up more than a dozen of those big-ass floppy disks during college, with nothing but text. Saving file space in those days was as sacred an act as saving trees.

Line 11: caught everybody’s glare

Okay, this part is just pure fiction. I doubt anyone in that office paid any attention to anything I did. Well, okay, that’s not entirely true. The bulk of my “work” was chatting with the deejay, to keep him or her from being bored. Most of the time the deejay during my shift was Beverly Hayes (her broadcast name), and we had these long, rambling conversations interrupted periodically by her required on-air utterances (e.g., “That was Neil Diamond with ‘Forever in Blue Jeans, and you’re listening to Class FM, 101.3”). Occasionally we sang along with the music, really belting it out. Sometimes I would have the strange experience of hearing two versions of Bev simultaneously: one talking in real-time about, say, the La Brea tar pits, and the other an on-air playback of an ad she’d recorded for the station: “Not elevator music, not hard rock ... just smooth, easy-listening favorites from the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s!”

Needless to say, my file deletion wouldn’t have caught the deejay’s glare. Who, then, was even watching? It could be that as a teenager I felt so self-conscious, I naturally believed that everybody automatically noticed my blunder. Perhaps the office manager did, if she was waiting for me to finish typing the document. But she wouldn’t have cared. She was a pretty cool gal, in her twenties, with a blond perm, a stick-thin figure, and a fondness for stiletto heels. She drove me somewhere in her Jeep once (I can’t remember where or why) and as soon as she turned the key in the ignition this MegaDeth song came on at party volume. Shoot, what was her name? I remember her walking through the station singing along to Peter, Paul, & Mary’s “Where have all the flowers gone?” but changing up the lyrics a bit: “We rolled them up and smoked them, every one!”

Line 12: trying to be neat

Isn’t it odd how much the act of using a personal computer involves aesthetics? Try turning down the screen resolution on your PC and you’ll immediately find that something is seriously amiss. Back in 1988, of course, all monitors were monochrome and every character was highly pixelated.  (And mere characters were almost all there was, graphics being a long way away for most applications.) About all we could do to improve things aesthetically was to shorten the list of filenames that would zoom by when you typed “dir” and hit Enter.

Line 13: job seems still to be intact

Could I really have been worried about losing my job? Well, perhaps, since it seemed too good to be true that they would pay me the princely sum of $5.50 an hour just to sit around yakking with a dejay (and, yes, occasionally putting up with a chaotic contest or a drunken tirade from the big boss).

Now, $5.50 an hour might not seem like a lot to you, or to Eminem, who rapped, “I’m tired of jobs startin’ off at five fifty an hour/ And then this boss wonders why I’m smartin’ off/ I’m tired of being fired every time I fart and cough.” But he wrote that in 1999. Adjusted for inflation, my pay in 1999 would have been $7.73 an hour. Hmmm. That still seems like not very much. In today’s dollars, though, it would be $11.59 an hour. That’s pretty good, actually. My daughter says she’d take it. (How did I calculate all this? Click here!) 

I was supporting myself on that receptionist job, plus my day job as a bike mechanic, so I’d have hated to get fired for deleting a file, farting, or coughing. I don’t recall ever farting or coughing at that job. I did, once, sneeze spectacularly. This was far enough along in my receptionist career that Bev had gotten tired of walking out to my desk from the broadcast room every time she was done talking on-air and had started another song. So she invited me to roll my chair into the broadcast room next to hers, and we’d just keep the conversation running right up until the current song was ending. Then she’d flip on the mike, the “ON AIR” light would go on, and I’d know to shut up. But one time, a sneeze took me by surprise—in fact it took us both by surprise—and was totally picked up by the mic. After a short, awkward silence Bev said her bit, flipped off the mic, turned to me and said, “Congratulations, you just sneezed all over the Central Coast.”

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Down With Convenience!

Introduction

“I appreciate the seamless ease….”

That statement is the inspiration for this post.  It’s from a letter a friend wrote me recently.  The point isn’t that he sounds like a TV ad (from the days when ad spokesmen were earnest instead of arch). The point, rather, is that I found this simple statement oddly inflammatory.  I asked myself why.  And the answer is, I should find it inflammatory, and so should you.  Ideally, all my friends would join me in mounting a War on Convenience.  If I can’t have that, well, maybe I can influence a few readers.

A paradox

Of course I was being bombastic and hyperbolic a second ago.  Who doesn’t want convenience in his life?  But I think convenience is like alcohol:  it should be enjoyed responsibly.

Paradoxically, my worldview straddles two seemingly conflicting ideals:  I’m a great lover of efficiency, but I bristle at society’s infatuation with ease and expedience.  “Wait,” you may ask, “aren’t efficiency and convenience pretty much the same thing?”

Nope.  When I say “efficient” I mean that I can get something done exactly how I want it done in as little time as possible.  (Often this involves doing a lot of work up front, like creating macros for a software application.)  When people talk about seamless ease, they’re often referring to systems that are merely intuitive, such as a user interface that can be grasped quickly, without any need for help menus or a manual.  Some products are convenient because they remove tedious steps; other products are convenient because they rescue you from having to learn something.

I think it’s widely assumed that where user interfaces go, intuitive is best.  But this isn’t always true.  Consider the computer keyboard:  to be maximally intuitive, its keys ought to be placed in alphabetical order.  That would make it easier for the first-time user, wouldn’t it?  But of course this idea seems silly, since typing efficiency is more important than making the keyboard layout straightforward for the newcomer.

What’s even sillier is that the QWERTY layout was actually designed to be maximally inefficient, to keep early typewriters from jamming.  The Dvorak layout I use was difficult to learn, but my long-term gains in efficiency were well worth the trouble.

Low-lying fruit

The simplest argument against the embrace of convenience is that it often requires us to forsake quality.  I give you microwave popcorn:  it’s certainly easy to make, but a) it literally stinks, b) it’s more expensive than traditional popcorn, c) it tastes pretty bad, d) it’s full of salt and fat, e) it’s full of chemicals, and f) the excessive packaging is bad for the environment.  The popularity of microwave popcorn makes me embarrassed to be a member of the human race, considering that an air popper is also extremely easy to use, and cheaper, and lets you control how much salt and butter you add.

Whipped cream in an aerosol can is also really convenient, but it’s more expensive and less tasty than what you whip at home, and has the added problem of unpredictability:  it’s hard to tell when the can is low on cream (or non-dairy “kreme” as it often is), so you never know when you’ll foul up your sundae with the liquid dribble that comes at the end.  By whipping my own cream, I can choose an organic product; whip only as much as I need; control the amount of sugar; and save money.

But enough of these convenient examples.  I want to get into the more subtle ways that, through our love of convenience, we sell ourselves short without even realizing it.

The problem of control

Often, complicated systems are made more intuitive, and sometimes more efficient, through a simplification of the user interface and/or automation of repetitive operations.  A little Cessna surely has a simpler interface than a commercial airliner, though it often lacks that handy autopilot feature.

Automation is a fine idea in theory, but in practice, it’s only as good as its execution.  How accurate are product developers’ guesses about what should be automated and how?

Well, here’s a horror story.  My family was visiting some friends in their lovely, sunny home in London.  One afternoon, when our friends were out, I thought, hey, my mother-in-law is always asking for a nice photo of my wife and me.  And here we had this great lighting, so I suggested to my wife that we finally take the time to shoot a nice photo together.  My wife has a tendency to close her eyes in photos, so it took us at least a dozen tries.  Well, on the last day of our visit, our host said, “Hey, why not give us some photos of your visit from your SD card?”  Great idea!  So I took the card up to their Mac and stuck it in the card reader, expecting that I could cherry-pick the best photos of both families.  But to my surprise the operating system seized control, copied every photo off the card, and launched a little slide show, set to music.  This might have seemed really helpful to a novice computer user who hadn’t mastered file management software, but I was appalled.  The software must have chosen to show the pictures in reverse chronological order, because the first two dozen shots were of my wife and me.  We came off looking like the biggest narcissists you’ve ever seen.

Probably there’s a way to tell the Mac not to automatically grab all the photos from an SD card.  But some systems don’t give us a choice.  We consumers often put up with this lack of control because we enjoy the convenience of the overall product.  I see this problem most frequently in Internet-based systems, particularly when the revenue model is more complicated than “you pay me directly for goods or services.”  Things are automated with more than just the user’s experience in mind.

Here’s an example:  the Gmail Adsense engine, which automatically produces custom ads based on my e-mail text, doesn’t exist to serve me.  Were I given the choice to opt out of Adsense, I certainly would.  I don’t even use Gmail, and yet (as detailed here) my e-mails to Gmail users nevertheless produce these tailored ads I like it or not.

But you know what’s even worse than that?  It’s when we’re unaware of how convenience is costing us.  Consider LinkedIn:  it’s very convenient, and a great idea, and I’m glad that it’s free.  But as I’ve only recently discovered, LinkedIn does what it pleases with the information I give it.  Awhile back, because my profile photo was like five years old, I put up a new one.  (The idea was anti-vanity:  I didn’t want people to think I was using an old photo just to look younger to the world.)  To my embarrassment, LinkedIn contacted my 400 contacts on my behalf:  “Dana Albert has a new profile picture!”  As in, “Dana Albert, devoted curator of his own image and his self-important notion of an Albert ‘brand,’ wants you to see his latest self-portrait!”  A few people responded, perhaps snidely, “Nice picture!”  How embarrassing.  (Yes, I am easily embarrassed.  What can I say … I’m an introvert.)

But that’s not all.  I’ve come to find out that LinkedIn evidently does something special for their newer users:  they send an update anytime one of the user’s contacts has made new connections.  Since I don’t get such updates, I’d never have known about this behavior, except a couple of friends commented.  (“Wow, I’ve see a lot of LinkedIn updates on you lately … did you lose your job or something?”)  Once I looked into it, I figured out how to change these settings, but it wasn’t easy—which means that those who thrive on convenience will probably just accept the default behavior.  (Surely I don’t need to go into the various ways Facebook has surreptitiously exploited their users’ tastes, preferences, and purchasing data.)

Are your choices my business?

“Fine,” you might say, “Go whip your own cream, and type on your weird keyboard, and shun Facebook, if that’s what floats your boat—but let me do as I please.”  In other words, you might wonder why your behavior is any business of mine.  Here’s why:  other people’s behavior often affects what choices are available to me.

Here’s how that happens.  Because I worship efficiency, I enjoy figuring out how to make a complicated process go quickly—but not everybody enjoys this process, and manufacturers know it.  New products are often targeted at teens and young adults (to build brand loyalty early), so new consumers’ habits can have an immediate influence on industry.  Streamlining a process, modern consumers believe, should be figured out by the manufacturer and baked into the product.  Thus, the focus is outward on the product, rather than inward on the user.  It’s not “How can I get better at this” but “How can this be better for me?”  The “smarter” our products get, the lazier we’re permitted to be.

(Fortunately, schools are still essentially old-school.  If it weren’t for teachers making kids learn math, do you think these kids would bother, given the ease-of-use of smartphone calculator apps?  And yet, once you’ve learned arithmetic, it’s faster to do it in your head.)

The result of this consumer/producer dynamic is that perfectly valid products are often kicked to the curb.  Consider the manual car transmission, aka stick shift:  is it straightforward?  Not very.  Is there a benefit to learning how to work a clutch?  I think so.  After all, a manual transmission offers better gas mileage, and enables me to roll-start the car if my battery is dead.  My mastery of manual shifting impresses the ladies, and enables me to rent a car in Europe.  The popularity, in this country, of automatic transmissions didn’t used to affect me, until that choice became so ubiquitous that some foreign car companies stopped exporting their stick-shift models here.  When I bought my last Volvo, I couldn’t get one with the transmission I wanted.  I had to settle for an automatic. 

(By the way, that bit about impressing the ladies?  Yeah, that was a joke.  Just seeing if you’re awake.)

Another example:  digital cameras.  What a great invention, and yet the camera industry is really suffering.  You know what the number one camera is today?  The iPhone.  It’s easy to see why:  you’re carrying your phone anyway, so why carry another device?  The problem is, phone cameras are not nearly as good as regular digital cameras—even the more humble point-and-shoot ones.  A phone camera takes inferior pictures because the lens is too small and doesn’t let in enough light for non-flash photography in low-light conditions.  Phone cameras also lack a zoom (their so-called “digital zoom” is pure malarkey—cropping masquerading as telephoto).

Look at these two photos.  The first was taken with a $200 Panasonic Lumix point-and-shoot camera.  The second was with a Motorola Droid phone of the same vintage. 

The point-and-shoot photo is much better, and not because I got out a light meter, set the F-stop, adjusted the shutter speed, etc.  It was as easy to snap as with the phone (easier, actually, because there’s way less delay at the controls).  The only convenience I gave up was having everything in one device.

If the camera industry were healthier, I’d have even better products available to me, and at lower prices (due to economies of scale).  Alas, the market for standalone cameras has been strangled by the ubiquity of camera phones—the more convenient choice.

Whom does convenience benefit the most?

Sometimes the person who seems like the most direct beneficiary of convenience-oriented technologies actually isn’t.  Consider the grocery store UPC reader:  it’s very intuitive, and thus perfect for bringing new cashiers up to speed quickly.  It’s also more efficient, but this benefit does not accrue to the cashier, who is paid by the hour.  The system’s efficiency doesn’t mean the cashier gets a raise; it means he or she is easier to replace, and the store can get by with fewer checkout stations.

Now let’s move beyond human consumers and consider other consumers, like cattle.  Being kept in a small stall in a feedlot is certainly convenient for the cow, in terms of her basic need for sustenance.  Of course this diet causes all kinds of trouble for the poor animal, but her well-being was never the point.  The convenience of the feedlot mainly benefits the meat packer.  Since this arrangement translates into lowered operating costs, which can be passed along to the human consumer, it looks like a win-win.  So it is with cheap, high-margin products like soft drinks and sugary cereal.  Needless to say, in the long term this convenience isn’t benefiting the human consumers, either.  The countless Americans who buy junk food and frequent fast food chains are basically backing in to their own feedlot stalls.

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies grasp that there’s big money to be made in drugs that treat lifestyle ailments, and doctors prescribe these drugs because doing so is so much easier than trying to get people to exercise and eat well.  Consumers participate in this lowest-price, lowest-effort economic model without an appreciation for its real costs.  The companies at the top in this economy are the direct beneficiaries of our rampant convenience addiction; by indulging it, they introduce a variety of societal ills.  In this regard, convenience is like secondhand smoke.

Convenience and parenting

If you’re a parent who has made it this far into my essay, I doubt you’re the kind who feeds his kid soft drinks, sugary cereal, and fast food.  But addiction to convenience is also present in the most upscale of products.  I’m talking about PCs, smartphones, tablet computers, and Netflix.

It’s more convenient to park kids in front of the TV or PC than to try to get them to help with dinner or with setting the table.  It’s easier to let a kid use his iPad in a restaurant, while his food gets cold, than to teach him how to behave like a grown-up.  So kids and their parents become co-dependents in a family dynamic that ultimately favors no one.

I won’t lie and say I never give in to such temptations.  But when I do, I don’t pretend I’m being a good dad.  “Shall we sit our kids down in front of a video and let them rot their brains out, just to get them out of our hair?” I’ll ask my wife.  And I’ll say to my kids, “Would you like to put in a video and let your brain be automatically extracted?”  This raises awareness and may help us fend off bad habits.

Do modern kids have the mental space required to daydream?  I’d guess a lot of them don’t.  So when my kids complain that they’re bored, I say, “Good.  It’s good to be bored.”  Necessity being the mother of invention, boredom is a good problem for the mind to solve.  Solving this problem with a library book, a blank piece of paper, or some random household detritus doesn’t do much for the economy, but the economy is not my problem.

“But wait,” you may protest, “Computers can be very educational!”  Yes, they can, but that doesn’t mean just any computer-based activity is intrinsically useful.  Too many parents pretend their Internet-addicted kid might become the next Mark Zuckerberg—because this fiction is more convenient than fighting with the kid about limits on his or her screen time.

My wife and I are all about limits.  This is why we don’t have cable, our kids don’t have phones or tablets, and their PC time is closely monitored and rationed.

“Okay, fine,” you might say, “You’ve identified some troublesome trends, but how are the habits of other families any of your business?”  Well, where the hell are my daughters going to find husbands?  My kids won’t settle for a passive, inert, pasty, video-addled mouth-breather who doesn’t read.  Meanwhile, the boys out there won’t settle for out-of-touch, pop-culturally illiterate nerds who don’t even text.  Sure, there are some boys out there whose parents are just as socially unconventional as my wife and me, but it’s a small pool.

Call to action

If you disagree with all of this, that’s fine—and I thank you for at least reading it.

On the other hand, if you agree with me, you may wonder what I propose to do about this rampant convenience addiction.  The answer is simple (though not easy).  Next time you appreciate the convenience of something, ask yourself if that convenience came at any great cost to you:  to your privacy, to your health, to your family, or to the environment.  Then ask yourself if it’s worth it.  I’ll keep on doing the same.

And at a minimum, if you find yourself using the phrase “seamless ease,” please don’t say it like it’s a good thing.