Numerically February was not an exciting or even noteworthy month, but spotting West Virginia in the MV Hospital parking lot made up for it. Why was I cruising through the hospital parking lot? I had just had a Lyme test. I do indeed have Lyme — again. How very Martha’s Vineyard.
I saw North Carolina as the month ran out.
Here’s the map. To make up for the dismal numbers, I’ve decided to use a different color pencil for each month. Wow. Radical, huh?
I haven’t exactly been following the presidential primary campaign, but I’ve found it pretty hard to ignore, not least because I hang out on Facebook. My Facebook friends have interesting opinions and post links to interesting stuff.
Massachusetts allows “unenrolled” voters, those who claim no party affiliation, to take the primary ballot of either party. I don’t identify as a Democrat, but in the absence of a feminist party, I caucus with the Democrats and take the Democratic primary ballot.
A February 22 Boston Globe editorial urged unenrolled voters to take the Republican ballot and vote for John Kasich. Why? The lead says it all: “Stopping Donald J. Trump is imperative — and not just for his fellow Republicans.” Some friends of mine are planning to do it.
Apocalyptic rhetoric is running wild this campaign, and running alongside it is the longing for a savior who can save us from the mess we’re in. I agree the country’s in a mess, but I’m skeptical about saviors and suspicious about apocalyptic thinking. I’m still planning to vote in the Democratic primary.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton are both credible candidates. Their positions aren’t that far apart, despite the rhetoric that suggests one is Gandalf, the other Sauron; compare either one to Kasich or Trump and you’ll see what I mean.
What’s a Democratically inclined voter to do? Set up a balance and toss bits of information into one pan or the other, then vote for the candidate with the most pluses and the fewest minuses? That sounds rational enough, and I’m a pretty rational person, but it wasn’t working for me.
My Facebook friends and I don’t always agree on what’s a plus and what’s a minus, and when we do, we often weight them differently. We take in pretty much the same information but come to different conclusions. This may take us by surprise, but really it shouldn’t: none of us are purely rational calculating machines, and even if we were, we’d have a hard time assessing what either candidate might actually accomplish if elected.
So we bring our personal history to the exercise, along with, most likely, some emotional baggage that can weigh heavily in the balance but isn’t exactly rational.
For instance: In 2008 I never for one minute considered voting for Hillary Clinton. That’s how much I loathed Bill Clinton. My loathing went way beyond disagreement with what he’d done in office, and even beyond my disgust with his lack of self-control while in the public eye. I blamed Bill Clinton for pretty much everything bad that’s happened on Martha’s Vineyard since he came here on vacation in 1993. He brought with him what looked like the entire national press corps, and they proceeded to broadcast to the world their limited understanding of the place. Whereupon the affluenza (many of whom vote Democratic) descended, bid up the price of housing, and started rearranging the furniture, all the while gushing about how wonderful Martha’s Vineyard was.
See what I mean? Lately it’s dawned on me that I loathed Bill Clinton mainly because he was the first presidential candidate I voted for who actually got elected and I felt personally responsible for everything he screwed up, especially Martha’s Vineyard.
Barack Obama was the second presidential candidate I voted for who actually got elected. I’ve disagreed, often strenuously, with some things he’s done or not done, but I still admire the guy tremendously. My detachment is greater, my expectations more reasonable, and President Obama has never embarrassed me in public.
As a feminist, and a radical feminist at that, I don’t expect to support any candidate heart, mind, and soul. Feminism doesn’t fit easily on the left-right spectrum because feminism puts women in the foreground and the left-right spectrum developed with white men in that position; the rest of us have to keep insisting that our lives matter, otherwise we’ll be pushed off to the side until the white guys’ priorities are dealt with.
Nevertheless, I caucus with the Democrats because — well, because Republicans, that’s why. (The idea of casting a vote for Kasich, the guy who just defunded Planned Parenthood in Ohio, turns my stomach.)
In concert a few years ago, feminist singer-songwriter-activist Holly Near said she didn’t expect to find a perfect candidate so she voted for the one she thought she could struggle with. I like that. This means to me the candidate who listens and who seems to understand and take seriously the issues I think are most important.
Politics for me has never been primarily about electoral politics. Fresh out of high school in 1969, I started college in Washington, D.C., and almost immediately joined the movement against the Vietnam War. Through it I met many, many veterans of the civil rights movement, the Old Left, and the labor movement. I also came up against sexism, both at the university and in the antiwar movement, and discovered feminism. In the mid-1970s, after several years away, I returned to D.C., came out as a lesbian, and threw myself into feminist organizing.
In 1976 I did volunteer for the campaign to pass the Massachusetts Equal Rights Amendment (it won) and work for Fred Harris’s presidential campaign (it lost). In 2012, I tithed to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign for the U.S. Senate (she won) and even ran for local office myself (I lost). But my experience and my reading of history tell me that the most important and lasting changes are brought about by movements outside the electoral system. Electing people willing to listen to those movements is crucial, but without that outside pressure, officeholders are limited in what they can accomplish, not least because other movements are continually pushing and pulling them in other directions.
So I took an early interest in Bernie Sanders’s campaign, which aspires to be, and within the electoral system already is, an effective outside force. But electoral campaigns have a drawback: because all effort and energy is necessarily focused on electing the candidate or passing the referendum, they tend to crash when the election is over, even when the campaign is successful.
The labor movement, the civil rights movement, and the women’s movement all took a long-haul approach. Short bursts of energy won’t sustain a long haul. Long hauls require infrastructure to channel and sustain that energy, to keep long-timers motivated and draw in new-timers who aren’t burned out yet. Lacking infrastructure, Occupy Wall Street burned itself out pretty quickly; where it did develop some infrastructure, it lasted longer.
So we come around to something that weighs especially heavy in my balance: what it takes to accomplish even modest objectives when people of diverse backgrounds, interests, and priorities come together in an organization or a coalition. It’s fucking hard work. It takes sensitivity, perseverance, and the bedrock knowledge that you are not going to get everything you want. (Neither is anyone else.)
This is true in my town of fewer than 3,000 people. It will be true of the country if Citizens United is overturned tomorrow, if “dark money” drains out of politics and inequality of wealth and income returns to, say, what it was in the 1960s or ’70s.
The 1%/99% frame popularized by Occupy Wall Street did focus attention on economic issues, but these days it’s obscuring some people’s understanding of how politics works — and here again I’m not talking just, or even primarily, about electoral politics. In this framing, all too often banks, retail chains that pay crap wages, and “corporate greed” become the Great Satan.
This view, like any framing that casts someone or something in the role of Great Satan, has at least three fatal flaws, which are not unrelated. One is that it lets the top 10 or 20 percent off the hook: we never have to look too hard at how we’ve helped perpetuate the established order, often because we were benefiting from it or it was leaving us alone. Two, anyone who appears to have associated with the 1% at any time becomes the Great Satan’s accomplice, toady, or dupe.
And finally, the Great Satan seems so omnipotent, especially to people who are too busy or too fastidious to get involved in “politics,” that clearly a savior is called for. When a prospect shows up, he gets cast in the role whether he wants it or not. Saviors are created in large part by our longing to believe. When elected to public office, they inevitably disappoint. This gives the all-or-nothing true believers an excuse to exit the field and return to their regularly scheduled programming.
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out who I’m planning to vote for in next Tuesday’s primary, and why: Hillary Clinton. I’m not looking for a savior. I’m looking for someone experienced in negotiating and coalition-building, who demonstrated a commitment to women before she started running for president. I like Sanders’s platform — who doesn’t? But without a clearer implementation plan, it’s all magical thinking — especially if his campaign doesn’t manage to continue past the election, which I doubt it will.
This past weekend the temperature took a deep dive to 8 or 9 below zero Fahrenheit. That’s about –23 Celsius. I’m learning to do approximate Celsius-Fahrenheit conversions in my head. In winter I like Celsius better because it makes it sound colder than it is. In summer I like Fahrenheit better because it sounds hotter.
Trav and I went out walking in the morning and again at dusk when it was below zero and the wind was howling around corners and the wind chill was probably about –23 F. I bundled up, Trav’s got one hell of a coat, and the cold was really no big deal.
Around 6:45 Sunday night, however, I set out for the weekly meeting of my writers’ group, which starts at 7 and is only two or three miles away. In my satchel were seven copies of this week’s installment of my novel in progress. I was looking forward to wine, popcorn, a roaring fire in Cynthia’s parlor, and hearing what everyone else in the group had been up to.
Malvina Forester was named after the late singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds (1900–1978).
I turned the key in the ignition. Malvina Forester coughed, coughed, and coughed again. Lights blinked on and off on the dashboard. Malvina, who’d never let me down, wouldn’t start.
My next-door neighbors are in France, visiting their daughter, who’s an exchange student this year in the Bordeaux area. Through the winter woods I could very dimly see lights from my two next-nearest neighbors, one in either direction, but it was pitch-dark, windy, and below zero. For an emergency I’d roust someone out of a warm house to give me a jump start. Missing writers’ group was not an emergency. I trudged inside and called Cynthia to say I couldn’t make it.
The next day was Presidents’ Day. I had work to do and nowhere to go. Malvina still wouldn’t start. No surprise there. I hoped it was just a dead battery and not something that would cost serious money to fix, like a dead starter. Did cold kill starters? I’m no computer adept, but I know more about cranky computers than I do about cranky cars. This is why I like cars that aren’t cranky.
At the top of Tuesday’s to-do list was “get Malvina a jump start.” Among the car-related docs in my glove compartment is the number for Subaru’s roadside assistance service. I strongly suspected that it wouldn’t apply on Martha’s Vineyard, never mind that the island is overrun with Subarus, so I looked closer to home.
The next-nearest neighbors aren’t generally home during the day. I thought to leave a phone message for one, but I didn’t have their number on hand and it’s not in the phone book. So I logged in to Facebook and PMed the other, along with two other not-quite-so-near neighbors. They’re maybe a quarter mile away through the woods, closer to a mile by road, but Trav and I walk by their houses nearly every day so they’re definitely part of “the neighborhood.”
So within half an hour I had two offers of assistance, and within another half hour one of my neighbors was in my driveway with his pickup and his jumper cables, which were lots longer than mine. With juice flowing into her battery, Malvina started right up.
Standing by the open hood, we couldn’t help noticing a high squealing sound and a faint burning smell. “Maybe the fan belt?” said my neighbor, then he extracted a fistful of twigs and leaves. “Mouse nest,” he said.
Both the sound and the smell went away.
I let Malvina run for 10 or 15 minutes, then for good measure drove down to the school and back. I took a deep breath, shut the engine off, then turned the key in the ignition. She started right up.
I later learned, from a Facebook buddy whose Subaru’s battery likewise got knocked out by the cold, that Subaru’s roadside assistance does work on Martha’s Vineyard, but I’m glad I didn’t know it when I needed it. Instead I’m reminded that I’ve got neighbors willing and able to help me out.
I realized something else as well; there are other houses I walk by regularly, and people I regularly see and wave at on the road, but the people who feel most like neighbors — the ones I hear from most often and felt most comfortable asking for help — are the ones I know on Facebook as well as face to face.
The off-season is for trespassing.
Something like 60 percent of the island’s houses are vacant for 8 or 10 months of the year. There’s no one around to yell at you if you cut through their backyard on the way to wherever you’re going.
For several of my early Vineyard years, in the late 1980s and very early ’90s, I lived where it’s West Tisbury on one side of the road and Chilmark on the other. (The West Tisbury side is State Road. The Chilmark side is South Road. Go figure.) I often rambled back in the woods, where the King’s Highway, an ancient way, follows the ridge line.
One particular house backed almost right up to the path. It was a saltbox, a common construction on Martha’s Vineyard as elsewhere in New England in which the long side of the roof slopes to within a few feet of the ground.
In this case, within maybe eight feet of the ground. And there was a good-sized boulder not far from the edge.
I have never in my life, not then, not now, been what anyone would call athletic, but I knew I could do this. I stood on the boulder. I jumped. I scrambled on to the roof.
And I climbed, using hands as well as feet, like a monkey, to the roofline.
Over the trees I could see the Atlantic Ocean. In assessors’ parlance I don’t believe that a view of the Atlantic from the top of the roof qualifies as a “waterview,” but don’t quote me on that.
Carefully I maneuvered my way down the short side of the roof to the skylights. I could see down into the summer people’s living space. It was an open floor plan with, as I remember, cozy furniture and at least one oriental rug.
Power is about access. People with more power have access to those with less, but those with less do not have access to them.
All the same, I was gazing into the living room of these summer people who didn’t know I was there, would never know I’d been there — unless I landed wrong jumping off the roof and broke my leg, which I didn’t.
When Trav and I went out this morning, it was snowing mightily. Hardly anything was moving on the roads. No people anywhere. I cut across the field and then the lawn of a house I usually take the long way around.
True, if you trespass when there’s 8 or 10 inches of snow on the ground, you leave tracks — the tracks of someone wearing size 10 boots with Yaktrax on. I’m betting that either the tracks will be snowed under or, more likely, melted away before anyone sees them. Here’s what I saw:
A breakfast or lunch or cocktail party called on account of snow. Waiting for spring.
Usually I get at least 20 states in January, almost half the total. This year? Hah. The tally when the month ran out was a whopping 13, a scant quarter of the 51 I’m looking for. (Because I lived in D.C. for 11 years, and because when I first registered to vote it was as a member of the D.C. Statehood Party, you know I count D.C. as well as the 50 that are fully represented in Congress.)
The usual number are most likely out there roaming around. I’m the one who’s not.
In order of their spotting, I saw Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Virginia, New Hampshire, California, Rhode Island, Vermont, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee, and Maine. Tennessee is a good catch for January, so there’s that.
February is generally a slow month. I’ve figured it’s because I spot nearly everything that’s here for the winter in January. If this February checks in with a strong showing that makes up for lackluster January, I’ll count that as support for my theory.
. . . but today most of it melted. My ice disk quartet was completely snowed under for two days. This is what it looked like this morning:
And this is what was left a little after noon:
When Travvy and I went out walking on Saturday morning, a light dusting of snow created subtle patterns on the ground.
Then it snowed and snowed all day long till there was about a foot of snow on my deck. Four inches makes it almost impossible to open my front door, so from time to time I interrupted my work to get out there with a shovel.
It was still snowing and pretty damn dark when Trav and I went out exploring. Since my nearest neighbors were away and I (of course) don’t have a cell phone, at 4:45 I posted on Facebook that we were going for a walk and if I didn’t check in within an hour or so to notify one of the more distant neighbors to send out a search party.
Well! It was tough going out there. My car was totally buried. The snow was heavy, heavy and wet. Many trees and limbs were bent way over with snow, like this:
Off in the woods I heard trees cracking. The path I usually take along the Dr. Fisher Rd., to avoid the worst puddles (aka lakes), was blocked by one tree after another. I kept detouring around the trees and pretty soon I was on a side road I didn’t recognize. Hmm. It is really easy to get turned around in the snow and dark. Intellectually I knew that no matter what direction I walked in, I’d hit a road eventually, but the idea of slogging an extra two or three miles on a night like this was not attractive.
Then I spotted the distinctive house marker (see photo at left) at the end of one neighbor’s driveway, so I knew where I was. After that it was slog slog slog along the path that winds behind the West Tisbury School. I hollered at whoever was blowing snow at another neighbor’s house, but the snow blower was too loud and nobody heard me.
Trav likes to do his business way off in the woods, but I told him no way were we going so far that I couldn’t see some house lights. He humored me. We made the first tracks on Halcyon Way. No surprise there: what other idiots would be out in this?
When I checked back in on Facebook, it was about an hour since I’d left. Two friends in Australia were seriously thinking of contacting my neighbors.
Sunday was dig-out day. I secretly like shoveling, so I shoveled my neighbors out as well as myself and Malvina Forester. My neighbor has shoveled me out more than once. I think he secretly likes shoveling too.
Halcyon Way didn’t look like anything would ever drive down it again . . .
but DECA showed up around noon and cleared both the road and the driveway. I could go anywhere, but where was there to go? Writers’ group was cancelled because there was nowhere to park at Cynthia’s. Last year the big snow of late January hung around and around and around. The writers’ group met at the library once or twice. Cynthia’s annual Groundhog Day party had to be cancelled for the first time in 25 years because there was nowhere to park in the driveway, the back field, or alongside the road.
Looks like it’ll be a go for this year. Whether the groundhog will see his or her shadow, who knows?
My buddy Alex Palmer blogs about sports, which isn’t high on my priority list but his writing is so good I read it all anyway. This particular post is such a slice (uh, sorry about that) of island life that I’m reblogging it here. Check it out.
I offer the following as both an antidote to 2016’s first dose of winter (at least here in southern Massachusetts) and an insight into how one person copes with island isolation. During the warm weeks of early January, I collected approximately 1700 golf balls from the woods, ponds, thickets and other hazards of a local golf course. I’ve been doing this kind of thing since moving here in 1998. Not only is it a fun form of outdoor exercise, it also provides me with a little extra income. Who knew that previously owned Titleist Pro V’s were such a hot item? I’ve had a few of these “Dispatches” sitting in a drawer, and this seems like a good time to break one out while I await Sunday’s kick-off in Denver.
Dispatches from the Rough
(In which The Golf Ball Guy plays God.)
From my position in dense pricker bushes bordering a…
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I knew that two characters in Wolfie, my novel in progress, were going to have a heavy conversation while walking on a beach. I thought the beach was going to be Great Rock Bight. Imagine my surprise when they wound up at the Gay Head Cliffs. I don’t get up that way very often (“it’s too far,” she whined), so yesterday Travvy and I headed all the way up-island to see what my characters saw and maybe hear some of what they were saying.
The Gay Head Light
The first thing I saw was the Gay Head Light, which wasn’t where I’d last seen it. Last spring, after more than two years of planning and fundraising, it was moved 129 feet back from the edge of the cliff that was eroding out from under it.
The lighthouse is still encircled with chain-link fencing because the work isn’t entirely done yet, so this is as close as we got.
It being January, the shops and the restaurant were closed up and deserted. Travvy and I had the observation area to ourselves. Trav sniffed at the clumps of grass while I leaned on the post-and-rail fence and looked first down at the cliffs, then out at the water. My characters were standing there too, ignoring me as if I weren’t there. I, however, listened closely to them. Shannon, who’s lived on the Vineyard for decades, pointed out over the water and said, “That’s Devil’s Bridge.” Her sister, who’d never visited the island before, said, “I can’t see anything,” to which Shannon said, “Neither can the ships.”
View from the observation area
Devil’s Bridge is a rocky underwater shoal that many a ship has foundered on. Perhaps the most famous wreck was that of the City of Columbus, which hit the rocks in the early morning hours of January 18, 1884.
The City of Columbus was much on my mind because three days earlier I’d read on Facebook this post by June Manning, native islander, member of the Wampanoag tribe, and teller of stories we’d do well to remember:
“It was 132 years ago today the Steamship City of Columbus went down off of Gay Head. Out of 132 passengers and crew, only 29 were saved. None of the women nor children were saved. Men were frozen while clinging to the masts. Heroic men of the United States Lifesaving Service rowed out to rescue the survivors. The USLSS was established in 1878 with boathouses at Dogfish Bar and Squibnocket. The crew had watches and would walk the beaches looking for those in danger. Our great-grandfather Francis Manning served, as did many of his fellow Wampanoag men and those from Chilmark and other Vineyarders.
“In 1895 the station was built atop the cliffs. The United States Coast Guard was formed in 1915 and it became Station Gay Head. Captain Bob Kinnecom is probably one of the few surviving crew as he was stationed there from 1951 to 1952. His father, Harold Kinnecom, had served as the captain. We were proud of their heroic service and can be just as proud of the crew serving at Station Menemsha at the present time as they went out early Friday morning to rescue men aboard a fishing boat heroically saving lives. THANK YOU!”
Yesterday afternoon was sparkling clear, the sky almost unbearably blue, but the bracing wind made it seem colder than it was, and that was cold enough. It wasn’t hard to imagine the City of Columbus going down in dark, frigid waters, pounded by rough seas, or the heroic efforts of the rescuers. For more about the wreck, the rescue, and the salvage operation that took place in 2000, see “Disaster on Devils Bridge.”
The path to the beach is much longer than I remembered, the beach itself much rockier. While I picked my way over the rocks, not wanting to turn my ankle this far from the car, another of my characters dropped in. This guy, Giles, is an artist, and he’s been working on a series of paintings in which Vineyard beaches come alive in ways that are sometimes sensuous, sometimes creepy, and not infrequently both. He hasn’t painted at Gay Head yet. I think that’s going to change.
Travvy on the path to the beach
Moshup’s Beach, named for the giant of Wampanoag legend who lived in the cliffs, is rockier than I remembered.
The reds get redder in the late afternoon sun . . .
. . . and the whites get whiter.
Because there’s no such thing as too many Travvy pictures
The road down-island. Aquinnah is as far up-island as you can get.
Not to worry, Microsoft: Bash the Behemoth is a popular sport, but I haven’t come here to bash you. I’ve come to relate some of my adventures since adopting my second laptop this past November.
First off, a little background: I bought my first PC in late 1985, and all the computers I’ve bought since — five desktops, two laptops, and a brand-new little tablet — use Microsoft operating systems, MS-DOS in the early years and Windows ever since.
The pilot’s seat, with Hekate on the lapdesk.
Hekate, my first laptop, turned five last July. This is late middle age for a computer, but she was in pretty good shape. I have been very happy with both Windows 7 and MS Office 2010, specifically Word, which, being an editor and writer, I use a lot.
However, the stickiness of several of her keys was becoming more and more of a nuisance. I decided to retire Hekate to backup status while she was still in good working order.
I chose a laptop that came with Window 10, though I’d heard mixed things about the new OS. People grumbled about Windows 7 too, after all, and I wound up loving it. I ordered the newest version of Quicken (I’ve been using Quicken 2006 since it was new) and MS Office 2016. I decided against Office 365, which uses the subscription model that you guys and others are pushing so hard. I won’t go into all the reasons why I’m deeply suspicious of this subscription model. Suffice it to say that for me it wasn’t cost-effective. Pay $130 or so for a program that will last me five or six years, or pay about $70 a year for more or less the same thing? This was a no-brainer.
Gizmo with a can of my favorite beer (Stowaway IPA from Baxter Brewing in Maine).
I also sprang for a little tablet because Dell was offering a good deal on its Venue 8 and because I’ve never owned a tablet. This was the first thing to arrive. I named her Gizmo.
My real adventures started when the laptop arrived just before Thanksgiving. I named her Kore. Our introductions went OK. I disabled Cortana, Win10’s much-ballyhooed “personal assistant.” Cortana is way worse than the dancing paperclip that insisted on assisting Word users till we turned it off.
Then neither Quicken 2015 nor Office 2016 would download properly. I’m not a technical whiz, but I have been my own IT person for 30 years. I know how to download and install software. I can follow instructions. I followed the instructions twice more to make sure I hadn’t goofed. Still no Quicken. Still no Office. Thus began a six-week saga that I think, I hope, is finally over. This is what I want to tell you about.
In my world, “tech support” and “customer service” are oxymorons. Yes, there are exceptions, but who among us isn’t filled with dread every time we have to contact a utility or computer company or government agency? We know we’re going to spend hours on hold listening to terrible muzak and chirpy recorded messages. It often takes several attempts before we get through to someone who can (a) understand our question, and (b) answer it. This is a sad state of affairs. Sadder still is that so many of us take it for granted.
At any rate, I generally have better luck with online chat, so that’s where I started. The Quicken problem, it turned out, was easy to solve. “What browser are you using?” asked the chat tech. “Chrome,” said I. “You have to use Internet Explorer,” he advised.
I did, and PDQ I had Quicken 2015 installed, upgraded to Quicken 2016, and loaded with the 15 years’ worth of checkbook and credit card data I’d accumulated with Quicken 2006. Here, Dear Microsoft, is one of my questions: Why did I have to use Internet Explorer? Are you, or perhaps your friends at Dell, trying to coerce us into using your browser instead of, say, Chrome or Firefox?
More to the point, why didn’t the download instructions say I had to use IE? You could have saved me some time and aggravation if you’d only made this requirement clear.
Quicken was easy. Office 2016 wasn’t. It took almost four weeks to get my duly purchased copy of Office 2016 up and running. The product key I received didn’t work. OK, goofs happen; I understand that. What I don’t understand is why I had to spend so many hours over so many weeks waiting on hold, waiting for phone calls, chatting with tech support, or exchanging emails with customer service reps. For some reason, Dear Microsoft, you weren’t believing Dell’s assurances that I really had purchased the program.
At one point I contacted you, Dear Microsoft, directly. Your tech remotely installed on my new laptop a copy of Office 365, which I hadn’t bought and didn’t want. When I discovered the mistake and pointed it out, he said he couldn’t help me any further.
Finally I told my latest Dell email correspondent that I wanted a refund so I could buy Office 2016 somewhere else. I was given the number for Dell’s “customer care” department (another oxymoron). While I waited in the virtual queue, a chirpy voice told me over and over that I might be able to could find an answer to my question at Dell-dot-com. Pretty soon I was screaming back, “I’ve been there! I’ve been there a dozen times! The answer isn’t there! That’s why I’m here!”
I gave up on the refund idea. Perhaps this is corporate strategy? Make it next to impossible to reach the refund department and we will stop asking for refunds? Fortunately Hekate and her copy of Word 2010 still worked fine. But I couldn’t shift completely from old laptop to new, not unless I wanted to use one laptop for writing and editing and the other for everything else.
Kore’s desktop
At long last, just before Christmas, a new product key arrived. This involved yet another chat with tech support, because your Office pages didn’t make it obvious where I was supposed to input the product key, but I was OK with that. I was practically euphoric. The time had come to transfer my Carbonite subscription and all my backed-up files from Hekate to Kore.
This was my first-ever Carbonite restore. I was nervous about it, nervous enough about the do-it-yourself instructions that I contacted Carbonite tech support. And you know what? Wonder of wonders, they were great. Easy to reach. Competent. Reassuring, even — did I say I was nervous about transferring all my files, many of which I couldn’t afford to lose? Why can’t all tech support be like this, I wondered, like it was in my early years as a PC user?
Kore and I were in business at last.
Except we weren’t. A few days into the new year, my attempts to use the Start menu started returning a “Critical Error” message. Sign out, the message said, and we’ll try to fix it. Needless to say, signing out and signing back in again accomplished nothing. A Google search on critical error start menu windows 10 revealed that many, many, many Win10 users (1) had had or were having this problem, and (2) didn’t get any answers from you, Dear Microsoft.
I tried a couple of fixes, neither of which restored my Start menu, then back I went to Dell’s tech support chat line. Short version: Over the next two days, I dealt with two tech support guys, both of whom were polite and professional, neither of whom could solve my problem. One morning the Start menu came back of its own accord. I was thrilled. By the end of the day it had vanished again. I was livid.
I returned to Google. This time I skimmed the comments threads on a couple of YouTube fix-it videos. Uninstalling and reinstalling Dropbox had solved the problem for some people. This seemed unlikely, but I’m an avid Dropbox user and what did I have to lose?
Wonder of wonders, it worked.
On one hand, this is a victory for crowd-sourced tech support. On the other, crowd-sourced tech support isn’t for the faint of heart, and it depends almost entirely on the kindness of strangers willing to solve and disseminate fixes for problems caused by your products, Dear Microsoft. You’ve been enthusiastically pushing Win10 upgrades on users of earlier Windows versions, without adequate knowledge of the havoc this can cause and without providing support for those who run into trouble. If users want real tech support, they have to pay extra.
Running through my head are two lines from Tom Lehrer’s song about rocket scientist Werner von Braun: “Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down? / That’s not my department, says Werner von Braun.”
If Cortana, your “personal assistant,” ever proves able to provide reliable tech support, let me know. I’ll reinstall it at once.
I did make a New Year’s resolution once. When I was working on my first novel, The Mud of the Place, and desperately afraid that I’d never finish it, I resolved that I would work on it every day until it was done.
Note that I did not vow to write a thousand words or two thousand words or any number of words. Nor did I vow to write for an hour or two hours or for any set time.
Just every day.
This turned out to be a brilliant move. There were days when I was so panicky, so sure that everything I’d done so far was crap, that I didn’t work up the nerve to open my Word file till ten minutes before midnight. And this was enough. Just opening the file and reading what I’d already written was enough to reassure me that this thing was good, this thing was worthwhile, I really needed to keep going till I finished this thing.
And that was enough to encourage me to add a few words, and sometimes to keep going till two in the morning.
Had I vowed to write so many words or for so many hours, there would have been no point to opening the file at ten minutes to midnight.
I haven’t made a New Year’s resolution since.
However, the New Year’s resolution frenzy continues unabated, and sometimes I feel left out.
Even though I suspect that New Year’s resolutions are basically a spam that people inflict on themselves to help big companies sell stuff. Seriously. Have you ever noticed around the end of January how much fitness and weight-loss apparatus goes up for sale in the want ads, Craiglist, the M.V. Times Bargain Box, or MV Stuff 4 Sale?
I hear something similar happens at gyms and other fitness facilities. Around 1 January the resolutioneers pack the place. The regulars have to wait in line, and even give tips to the newbies. By the end of the month the crowds have disappeared. The regulars have the place to themselves again.
So many New Year’s resolutions pit the mind against the body. The mind, aka “good intentions,” is determined to beat the body into submission, by losing weight, exercising regularly, eating healthy, or some other goddamn thing.
Got news for y’all: The body is always going to win. If mind doesn’t learn how to work with body, mind is always going to lose. Been there, done that . . .
Nevertheless, I wish you luck with whatever resolutions you’ve made. May wisdom grow from your struggle.
Still, I was feeling a little left out, so — since other people are so into resolutions — I decided I’d make some resolutions for other people to keep.
One look at my Facebook news feed and this quickly got out of control. “I will shuddup about the 2016 presidential election until October 1” came up a lot. “I will think about what the Second Amendment actually says before spouting off about it” ran a close second.
Finally I settled on this one:
If my dog poops on a path that other people walk on, I will either pick it up in the baggie that I (of course) carry in my pocket at all times, or I will kick it into the underbrush with the toe of my boot.
Trav has been known to raise havoc, and he would raise much more if he could, but he never, ever poops on the path.
From the Seasonally Occupied Territories . . . 