Offices.

Everyone hates offices. I don't know anyone who gets excited about offices in general. No one is thrilled because of the office. Everyone complains about them. You'd think they were sheer torture. 

They're mostly just dull and designed poorly.  

meh

I remember -- but have been unable to locate -- a picture of a big magazine subscription department from more than a century ago. I think it was Ladies' Home Journal, then based in Philadelphia, which advertised itself as "The Magazine with a Million," meaning a million subscribers in 1903 -- a towering achievement at the time, something no other U.S. magazine had done. The subscription office was a huge floor with tiny little desks laid out like a vast bingo card. Each worker had his or her little desk to process subscriptions. It must have been hot, boring as hell, and I don't know how anyone could have stayed awake. No one was rushing to the bathroom to check TikTok or play Wordscapes. It probably paid peanuts, too. 

On the other hand, it was not expected to be a career in and of itself. A man working the tiny desk might be going to business school at night -- a perfectly acceptable alternative to college then. A woman doing the job would probably be expected to leave to get married at some point, unless she was supporting her sickly old mom. But it was desirable work, in that you were not being run off your feet like a waitress or digging ditches like a slob.

Bad and boring as it may be, office jobs were considered superior to other kinds of work. In many regards, they still are, although the way we krex and moan about them you'd think we were getting surgery without anesthesia every day. To be fair, in 1903 there were no overweening tin-pot HR dictators, no "team building" exercises, and no mandatory training to tell you to respect one another's pronouns. 

Did offices ever really have this kind of thing?  

No place I ever worked, at least that I know of. Yes, folks, this is a genuine book from 1962, and this is what guys used to do before X-rated movies and OnlyFans. See why Americans were more literate in those days? We even had to read to get our naughty thrills. 

Things have changed so much since 1962, let alone 1903. Automation and computers have been eating away at jobs for decades, and guys like Elon Musk say they'll even take over the "creative" businesses like advertising. The Internet has devastated the magazine business as much as any other. Ladies' Home Journal closed up shop almost ten years ago. Rival Good Housekeeping is still alive as a magazine, but I've heard that in the 2010s, LHJ had lots of boneheaded management hastening its end. 

Except for those who program and feed the computers, office jobs may be on the way out entirely. We may complain about them, but we'll miss them when they're gone. 

Bartleby the scrivener was an office worker, you know. 

Ah, office! Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!  

All I want is a room somewhere.

Isn't this a nice office? Of course it's fake, an AI-generated artwork, but nice for all that. It doesn't have a lot of those bizarre AI details, like a D&D monster crawling out of a potted plant. Although a potted plant seems to be holding the curtain open. I can't quite figure how the window works, and if it's in a city building, it probably doesn't work at all. Plus, it's time to complain to the landlord. The floorboards are coming up. 

On the whole, though, it is a lot less messy than my actual home office, the box of files in the middle of the floor notwithstanding. It doesn't have a skid of toilet paper and another of paper towels from the warehouse store. There's no exercise bike sitting idle in a corner. It has no cabinet full of dog snacks and dog-care items. While it does have two computers, it does not have two printers (one of which is only hanging on until its toner is used up). There are some stacks of paper, but nothing like my desk, where notes and pens vie for space with books, hand lotion, wires, and small tools. And there is no complete dining room set, disassembled, as in my office (for reasons too complicated to get into here).

Alas! My mother was right. For years she threatened to get a big saw and cut my bedroom off the house. She foresaw an Oscar Madison-like existence for me, buried under piles of junk. For a time after I left home that was not the case, because I didn't have that much stuff. Then I met my wife, and we got married, and we lived in an apartment, so there was little space to pile up the junk. When we got our house, I was determined to keep things orderly and not bring shame unto my family. 

That lasted a while. But things start to pile up. When I started working from home, the real disaster struck. I was too busy to neaten up as I would at a real office, because as a freelancer, any work that wasn't paying work was a waste of time. So my office became the dumping ground for things that fit nowhere else. And here I am. 

If you hear a rumor of a writer being buried by his own stuff, don't jump to the conclusion that it is me -- book people tend to be packrats as a class. But it could be me. And if I were to go under a pile of books, then I shall have died as I lived, crushed by an endless avalanche of words.  

Electric heels.

One of the things I miss least about working in an office is getting to the office and getting home from same. Since most of my career was spent commuting via public transportation and shoe leather, the winter was the worst. Heavy coat, heavy boots, sloppy streets, grumpy New Yorkers. A regular winter wonderland. 

In those days I would keep a cheap pair of loafers in my desk -- one of those Payless pairs or the like that seemed to be made of compressed Hefty bags. That way I wouldn't be clomping around the place all day in my boots. The downside was that the plastic shoes, combined with winter air so lacking in humidity that it actually sucked water out of our skin, plus industrial carpeting, made the static electricity awful. I would carry a quarter in my pocket to tap against door handles to avoid getting shocked. The sparks between quarter and handle were often quite visible. I'd think, Isn't this how the Electric Eel on Underdog got his powers?

Believe me when I say how happy I was to not have a job that required working outdoors on such days. The reward of working outside on lovely days instead of being stuck in an office did not make up for having to labor in the freezing cold and rain and snow on tough days. But still, the static electricity was annoying. I think you could have stuck balloons on the wall without even rubbing them on your hair. Just carry one around for a while. 

Of course, my imagination and lack of scientific rigor expected more spectacular effects -- people's hair on end like they were hugging Van de Graaff generators; laptops shorting out at desks in a shower of sparks; the network being brought down by massive power surges; the combination of shocks and polyester clothes and negative humidity causing spontaneous human combustion. Fortunately real-world science is a little more forgiving than that. 

Winter still has lots of perils, so be careful out there, especially if you live in a land of ice and snow as I do. And if you work in an office, be careful in there. I'm not saying spontaneous human combustion is an actual danger, but the odds may be a titch north of zero. 

Entering the workfarce.

Hello, young graduates. I congratulate you on surviving whatever school you have just or are about to just be ejected from, to find yourself spreadeagle in the center of the road of your new career. 

You may be tempted to just take a little time off, figure out what you want to do, before you commit. This is the first time you had nothing expected of you since preschool, right? Why not relax, hang out this summer, play videogames, and freeload some more off Mom and Dad? 

DON'T DO IT! It's a trap! I understand that you don't want to start a whole new grind right now, but do you really want to punch your ticket to Loserville? Trust me: Loserville has a high population, but it's still the loneliest place on earth. If you get cozy being a lump all summer, you'll still be cozy being a lump in the fall. It gets harder the longer you hang around. Have you earned the right to live off someone else's effort as an adult? Of course not. 

Now, don't fret; it's not as awful as it may seem. Your first job may be horrible, but you know what? It's not like your grammar school. You can leave. You can find a different job. You're young; your skillset is growing. You're not cast into a highly specialized role. Just don't go back to the sofa. 

There are a few other things I think you should keep in mind, some of which maybe no one had to think about decades ago because they were not an issue. But for your career health and mental health I recommend the following bits of wisdom.

🛠 If work was fun, they'd call it play.

🛠 Do your best even if the job is lousy. It's good for your self-respect to establish good habits. 

🛠 Your workplace is not like family, no matter what they tell you. This is important. Startup companies can have that feel, but it's illusory. Say you join software startup TwoGuysAndAParakeet.com, working long hours to develop some damn business software (we don't make things anymore in America, we make software to help other people make things, usually somewhere else). At first it's exciting, and you feel very close-knit. Trust me: The rounds of fund-raising will end and PyroQEET.com will be launched, and the first time quarterly earnings projections fail, your "family" will have no problem divesting itself of you.

🛠 It gets worse than that. You know the people in high school who always kept score, who never forgot a thing you did and would use it against you? They're out there working too now, and they have not changed. Pettiness and backbiting are fun ways for some people to liven up the day. 

🛠 When it's really bad, remember that rampant workplace politics are the sign of a sick organization. Get out!

🛠 Don't be too impressed by so-called serial entrepreneurs. It's not that they fail a lot -- most new businesses fail -- it's that they chase that excitement of a new venture like some people chase new love, and like those people they cannot be trusted in the long haul. Plus, when they do fail, it's usually on someone else's dime. And you're the one who's out of a job.

🛠 Do not expect to or even desire to want to bring your "whole self" to the job. If the company tells you that it wants to engage your "whole self," they're wholly full of crap. No one wants to deal with anyone else's detritus at work, and everyone's "whole self" includes sacks of detritus. No one cares, and that's okay. We were never meant to find personal fulfillment at work, unless the work itself is that fulfilling, and even then, leave the personal stuff at home where it belongs. 

🛠 And on that note, there is a very good chance that you will have to pick between the personal fulfillment of a great job and the actual fulfillment of your bank account. The really satisfying jobs don't pay as well as the others by and large for the simple reason that people will do them for free. I'm not advising you which to pick if you find yourself at that crossroad. Either choice is all right. 

So there you go, my young friend. You can take my advice or leave it. I'm not wealthy, and no one is asking me to do any TED Talks, but I can assure you that part of the reason is that I did not adhere to these tips for my own rambling path in life. 

Do you want to have a good career or not? Then you must learn not only from the successful but from the rest of us as well. We know a lot, believe me. 

Pushpin the Barbarian.

Some ages ago my wife gave me an excellent Christmas gift: A set of bulletin-board pushpins shaped like medieval weapons, a product of novelty company Nuopinc. The only problem was, I didn't have a bulletin board.

Well, I do now! 

Makes it look like we had a bar brawl with li'l tiny Conan the Barbarian and his pals in here. 

I'm not saying that I got the bulletin board just to display my swords and axes and daggers. I had to switch desks with my wife due to dog-related issues, and her desk doesn't have as much surface area for the piling of papers. So I thought a bulletin board would help, and as the French say, WAH LAH! or Ze idea, I have!  I recalled that I had these awesome pins. 

I'm not posting them here to make you jealous, by the way. That's just a bonus. 

If you want to get a set of your own, I think you can get it from Vat 19, but I'm not sure. Both that site and the manufacturer's site look a bit bewhiskered, like the businesses died during COVID and no one told them. My wife said she got my set at Think Geek, and sure enough my autopsy of that terrifically fun site back in June 2019 mentioned these pushpins and my plan to get a corkboard just to use them. Well, it didn't work out like that; I didn't buy a corkboard until I actually needed one. But I have the best pushpins in town. 

They're particularly good for posting something regarding a task I don't want to do. Take THAT, doctor's appointment card! Stabby stab stab!

Man, my G.I. Joe would have had some fun with these weapons back in the day. Some bad guys would have wound up with axes in their skulls, you can bet on that. 

WooOOOOooooOOOoo.

I gave up my office upstairs, and in return got a wireless mouse that I don't use. 

It was a sensible decision. I almost never have online meetings or business calls; I have never seen the faces nor heard the voices of most of the people I work for. It's all e-mail, and that suits me. But my wife has constant online meetings and calls, and the distraction of baby puppy Izzy was too dangerous. She could very easily be on an important call that suddenly turned into a Korean-expert-on-the-Beeb situation, our dog rushing in to play, me (unshowered) flailing in after him and tripping on something.

It made sense to trade offices with her. Hers was downstairs, where the dining room would be if we had a dining room, and mine was directly above it in the spare bedroom. Izzy is not allowed upstairs during business hours, and a gate on the stairs enforces the rule. So, we made the swap. 

I had to leave a lot of stuff upstairs -- my books, my posters, my framed photos of the Three Stooges and the Marx Brothers and, oh, some family members -- and in exchange she left her old wireless mouse. The kind where you plug a USB nub into the computer and the mouse sends it the signal. 

Well, I tried it, and I didn't much like it. BUT I had an idea for a prank. 

First: Sneak upstairs and stick the nub in her computer (and no, that's not a euphemism). She has a Mac, so all the USB ports are in the back where they are not visible. Next: Remove her mouse's nub. Third: Change her computer's wallpaper to a Ouija board.  

Then I wait. When she sits down at her computer, I start moving the mouse she left me around on the ceiling, hoping it will point to various things on the board. It would be great if I could spell out something, like R-U-N or G-E-T-O-U-T or M-A-K-E-M-E-A-S-A-M-M-I-C-H, but there's no way I could do that, even if I sneaked a spy camera into the room so I could see what I was doing. I'd have to be happy with commandeering the pointer and making it look like a specter was trying to get her attention.

Thing is, I don't even know if the signal from the mouse can penetrate the ceiling. I'd need a second pair of eyes to check. Unfortunately there's no accomplice handy to help, except Izzy, and he's A) not allowed upstairs during the day, B) a bad liar, and C) a dog. My prank will have to wait until I get some flunkies to help. 

Maybe I'll put an ad on Craigslist: Henchmen Wanted. No Pay, Just Laughs. Worked for the Joker!

Vender bender.

 

Hidden costs.

 

It's a living.

 

Goo housekeeping.

It's happy homemaker time again, boys and girls! Today we're not going to wash our fine washables; we're going to dust our fine dustables. That is to say, we're going to try a product I got in my Christmas stocking, one designed to pick up dust from all sorts of surfaces... or maybe it's intended to turn into a giant town-eating blob. Could go either way.

ColorCoral, made in China (just like COVID-19!), is billed as a cleaning gel on Amazon, a gel that can be smushed on any surface and removed along with the dust, and used again and again. That's it. The jar comes with no instructions but a drawing of a hand pressing the gel onto a keyboard. Amazon's page has some details, however: 

【Universal Fit】ColorCoral cleaning gel, simple and convenient cleaning kits for PC/laptop keyboard 💻 and other rugged surface, such as the car vent 🚖, camera 📷, printer 📹, telephone 📠, calculator, Instrument 🎺, speaker 🔈, air conditioner, TV 📺 and other appliances.

【Safe Cleaning Gel】This universal dust cleaner is made of biodegradable gel, no sticky to hands, smells sweet with lemon🍋 fragrance, no stimulation to skin👌.

【Easy Dust Cleaning】Make sure your hands are dry and clean, 👉 take a piece of the cleaning gel, 👉knead it into a ball, press the cleaning gel slowly into the keyboard, car vent and rugged surface and then pull out, the dust would be carried away with the cleaning gel.

【Reusable】The keyboard cleaning gel could be used repeatedly till the color turn to dark 🌚 or it become sticky, then you have to replace the gel with a new one 🌝. After cleaning, please stock the cleaning gel in cool place. (📌Don’t wash the gel in water.)

【In the package】1* universal cleaning gel, we provide the cleaning gel with 💯100% money back guarantee, if you find the package broken, the cleaning gel dirty, or any other quality issues, please contact us through message 📩, we promise you a free replacement and a full refund.

Soooo... All right! Let's try it!

Right off, we can see that it is a gel, all right. And it does have a slight lemon scent. But don't eat it! (The jar does warn against that.)

I broke some off and pressed it on and about my dusty keys.

I have to admit it worked -- somewhat. It got the obvious dust, but not the more stuck-on bits of debris. (No, it's not salsa stains or anything like that. Well, maybe coffee.) I think the ColorCoral is okay, but for dusting, I think a can of air will do the trick faster, easier, and more thoroughly. Also more expensively; not sure why cans with nothing but air cost more than $5 and don't last long, when spray cans full of actual stuff cost a lot less. I suppose there's a reason. The ColorCoral gel is $7 but can be reused quite a lot. However, I did not find it to be the miracle cleaner I'd hoped. 

It's back in the jar for you now, ColorCoral! Maybe I'll dust some of my bookshelves with it. Meanwhile, it stays tightly closed. Steve McQueen is not around to defeat it this time. 

Pow! Bam! Biff! Monday!

First Monday of the year, and time to return to the ol' deskeroo and get back in action. Fortunately I don't have to fight this battle alone. Thanks to Santa Claus, I have some Bat-help for the challenges of the day:

Thanks to the Unemployed Philosophers Guild (most of whose other products I would throw in the garbage) and a thoughtful wife, I have these Batman Sticky Notes to help me punch! through the trials of a Monday. 

It's a nice selection and useful as well. If I need to stick an alert on something, there's the Bat-Signal stickies; if I need to flag things in a manuscript there's a variety of flags.

And of course, for important notes to myself or others, there are the large stickies with space for writing.

One of the interesting things to me with these is they've gone for the Bronze Age look for Batman for these notes, including the logo and the little picture of the Batmobile. This is how the Caped Crusader looked c. 1970 to 1985. Afterward we got the darker, grittier, grimmer Batman of the current day.

As Alan Stewart, retired librarian and comics memoirist, puts it, the Bronze Age Batman was more human, capable of a range of emotions, as opposed to "contemporary portrayals of the Dark Knight in which that range often seems to go right from grim determination to barely-controlled rage, with very little in between (or beyond)". 

Well, that wouldn't be a good attitude to approach work, would it? Better to have the Bronze Age Bats, who can be more even-tempered and less likely to resort to violence as a first option. And was probably the Batman most of the target audience would recall from childhood. 

Anyway, the Batman Sticky Notes are in the top drawer, where they will come in handy. Having the World's Greatest Detective close by will be helpful, because I can't find a damn thing on this desk anymore. 

Oh, you know.

"Another bad day?"

Lower the Zoom.

"I don't wish to cast aspersions, but I suspect that the enthusiasm for our Monday
meetings has waned somewhat since the start of the quarantine."

First day back.

"It's just so great that we can have meetings in person again!"

The paper chase.

The whole world's going batty, and we don't even know if it's appropriate or not.

I'm not even talking about the bizarre and audacious lies of the Chinese, that the so-obvious-it's-painful Chinese Wuhan flu did not originate in CHINA, WHERE IT ORIGINATED, as they have lied about everything else regarding this thing. Nor do I mean the wacky attempt by China's Western bootlickers to back them up. That stuff is beyond gaslighting and into sad little comedy, like the toddler who lies about taking your Perugina when he's holding the chocolate in his hand and is covered with the stuff, except instead of Perugina he's holding a loaded gun, and instead of chocolate it's blood.

Do not let them fool you.

No, I'm talking about weird and/or surprising choices by the people in our own country.

Here's a couple of things that have struck me in the last few days, and have probably struck you as well, summed up briefly:

1) It's kind of crazy that sports leagues, Broadway shows, science and medical conferences, comic cons, and concerts have all shut down. That pretty much covers all the kids I knew in high school. The one that made me smile was Celine Dion putting the "Courage World Tour" on hold -- whether it's smart or not, it doesn't look good to cancel something called "Courage" out of "Fear."

2) This TP buying has turned into a cascade of crazy. First it was the panic buyers, who always run for toilet paper when a storm is coming. But it was so bad this time that less high-strung types were thinking, I have enough Angel Soft for the week, but with all these crazy people clearing the shelves, by the time I need more there will be none. Better get some! Not like it goes stale. And thus, the Great Toilet Paper Buy of 2020, which makes us look like lunatics, because toilet paper cannot protect anyone against the coronavirus.

I wish I had come up with this one; I salute the person who did.

3) Our schools hardly got any snow days this winter, but they're about to make up for it in spades. They closed yesterday, events are being canceled, and they will probably close down for at least a couple of weeks. It's been easier to shut off the colleges, whose spring break seems to come earlier, and whose students can all be expected to have computers and Internet access for remote learning.

4) Even worse, churches are closing, and here we are in Lent. The Catholic churches here have not thrown in the towel, unlike the churches in Rome (!!!!!) and France, but our local Methodist and Presbyterian churches have closed down for a couple of weeks. Not sure about the local Temples and the Lutherans.

5) Offices closing -- this is not as big a deal as it once was, again because so many people in office jobs can work from home now. I sat in remotely on a meeting for a company, a publisher for whom I do freelance stuff. It was all instructions on how to log in to the system from home -- which I do anyway, so it wasn't useful to me, but I figured I'd check in and make sure there was nothing new. The funny thing is, I've been their lurker, the unseen sweatpants guy in the cave, proofing copy, and now they'll all be joining my sweatpants cave cult. Ha ha!

🏥🔬🔕⚠😷💀

What does this all mean? We hope nothing. We hope that there are no, or at least very few, more people getting sick from the coronavirus pandemic, and in a few weeks we look around at our piles of TP and laugh and say, "What were we thinking?"

Or maybe, "Thank God, this shows that our plague preparations work in some areas but could use help in others. We'll tune up the system and be in better shape if it happens again. Next time could be really bad."

Maybe the worst outcome would be, "What a load of crap! What a big nothingburger! What a waste of time and effort!"

I hope that doesn't happen. If people think this was never a big deal, no worse than a bad cold, then whole governments and the entire media become the shepherd boy who cried wolf.

It might be cynical fun to look at it that way, but think of this: In the original Aesop fable. after the shepherd boy is established as a liar, the wolf gets to pick off the sheep at his leisure. In this story, though, the sheep will be us.

Staff meeting: The Vision Thing.

[Twelve figures in a meeting room; one walks in and stands before them, clearing his throat to stop the chatter.]

"All right, all right, everyone, let's settle down. It's our first staff meeting, and we want to make sure we're all on the same page, right? Okay, I think I've met all of you. Of course, I'm 2020, the new CEO, and our goal is to make this the best year ever. The first thing I'd like to discuss is the promotion of the new year. The last CEO had a pretty good slogan -- 'You Say You Want a Revolution' -- but maybe a little too suggestive. I was jotting down some ideas on the way in and I like this one. Ready? '2020: Get the Vision.' Clever, don't you think? Yes, there, uh, July, is it?"

"June, sir. July's my sister."

"Oh, yes, sorry. Strong family resemblance."

"We've been told. I don't wish to sound negative, sir, but that slogan is all about the new year -- nothing about the rest of us. It sounds like of, well, yearist to me."

"Hmm... While I appreciate your input, July --"

"June, sir." 

"June, sorry... While I appreciate your input, I must remind you that when we all come together we are a year, and that's what this is all about. Not just me, you see, but all of us."

"Balderdash!"

"Excuse me?"

"It's me, August! And you may call it a team, but I call it another annus horribilis! We months never get the respect we deserve!"

Grumble grumble harrumph harrumph he's right he's a damn hothead

"All right, all right, everyone, let's table the slogan for now. What I want is for you to tell me what your plans are to make this year excellent. Would you like to begin? Yes, you in the front."

"January is the name, and I intend to be every bit as excellent in starting this year as I always am, MISTER 2020."

"Psst... Mr. 2020 -- me, March. Don't mind her. She always acts icy and mean up top, but she's hot down under."

"I, uh, noticed."

"I object! I object to this objectification!" 

Grumble grumble harrumph harrumph

"Please, please! Everyone, focus! Remember, this is not about us! This is about the people on this planet. Does anyone else have any plans?"

"Why, I do, sir, indeed I do! December here, and my oh my, I am already looking forward to my turn at the wheel. We just had a wonderful Christmas season but I think we can completely surpass it next time! I just hope, if I may say, that my colleague November doesn't elbow in again as usual."

"I object! Mr. 2020, December is completely out of line. It's not my fault she's always spilling that Christmas stuff into my space!"

"Well, if we're going to be little Mr. Norbert Nitpickers here, let me say that I don't much care for May calling herself the 'Merry Merry month' -- some of us put a lot of effort into our merriness, don't you know."

"Yeah, whatevs, Grandma."

"I, uh, dislike being confrontational -- my name is September -- but everyone seems to intrude in my space. Here I am, a pleasant month in any and either hemisphere, and yet I am neglected, shoved into seasons I don't properly belong, full of complaints about school and work. But you never hear me complain, no sir."

"All right, well, I'm sure we all have concerns, but we can work them out, have some open and friendly dialogue. Let's sit down and --"

>**FRRRAAAAAAP**<

"Who put a whoopee cushion on my chair?"

"Tee hee!"

"You're a fool, April."

"Look, I think we're off on the wrong foot here."

"Or cheek." 

BWA HA HA HA

"That's enough. I want you each to send me a report by week's end with your thoughts for this year, all right? And keep to your lanes, people; we're taking it one month at a time. Dismissed."

[2020 sighs, rubs face in hands. Mumbles, "No wonder none of the CEOs last beyond twelve months in this joint." Then he looks up, says wistfully: "2020: Get the Vision." Smiling, he sits back.]

>**FRRRAAAAAAP**<

Be careful out there!

Fail-safe.

I used to drive to the office. The drive could be a hassle, but the place was pleasant. Good old-fashioned cubicles, none of this stupid and counterproductive open-concept office nonsense. You could actually get work done. The company seemed to like it. They had painted one of the conference rooms with custom-designed company images, and a couple of years later painted another to look like a forest. Really nice job, too. Painters worked on it for weeks.

A short while after the forest went up, a rumor started to swirl that we were pulling up stakes and moving closer to the main New York office, in midtown Manhattan.

"No way," I said. "They just painted a whole freaking forest in 7B!"

Six months later I started taking the bus to midtown Manhattan and riding a subway from the Port Authority to the office.

My commute became longer and more annoying and more expensive.

The forest did not save me.

Sometimes when you tell yourself there is an ace in the hole, a fail-safe, that you're protected and can relax. Probably the classic example is "The Germans will never cross the Maginot Line!" Well, yes and no....

Some fail-safes work very well. I've always admired the ingenuity and courage of Elisha Otis, in coming up with a simple but effective device to stop an elevator from crashing and for testing it in public with his own personal life. Even now, elevator mechanic is a risky job. It's like being an auto mechanic if the car has to be driving around while you're propped at the engine. I've seen an elevator crash from the lobby to the cellar while someone was working on it, but fortunately it was a short fall and he was okay. It's not always the case.

Other fail-safes are only so-so. We're told this year that the flu season is looking like a doozy, so get those flu shots. On the other hand, recent years' shots have had pretty poor effectiveness. It's easy to understand why, the flu vaccine being an annual guessing game, but it doesn't make us more confident in it. I may get the shot, but I'm not going to march onto a ward full of flu patients afterward if I can avoid it.

I guess the point is, safety measures are great, but we always must be careful about relying on them too much. In the case of the flu shot, other commonsense precautions like hand-washing, avoiding infected people, and not licking subway car handles are important to follow as well. In the elevator -- well, there's nothing you can do if you're on the elevator and it plunges like a rocket to the subcellar. Pray.

Of course, if the escalator gets stuck, stay calm and wait for help. Better safe than sorry.

Same with my old office.

One group text was all it took, and Clown, Incorporated's productivity was shot to hell for the day.

Freedom from me!

I was cleaning out the ol' desk at home, a little task that's been, oh, maybe... 15 years in the making.

Hey, it takes me a long time to accumulate that much junk.

The proximate cause of this week's action was that I couldn't find my thumb drive backup, so I just dumped the three drawers on the floor.

I did find the object of my quest. Then I had to do something about the mess on the office floor. A mess that included old floppy disks, a billion paper clips, zombie ballpoint pens, and notebooks. Pounds and pounds of notebooks.

It's stuff I wrote ten or closer to twenty years ago. Oooh, maybe that short story I couldn't find is in there! Let's have a look!

Ugh.

After reading through them for a few minutes, I found a blank page and summed up what I'd seen:

Sometimes I forget the turmoil I've gone through, which hardly makes sense -- you don't forget the hurricane that ripped off the roof just because you had it fixed. These notebooks were part of my attempt to work through a lot of the doubt, terror, resentments, and self-pity -- OOOH the self-pity -- that I probably should have gotten past in my teenage years. I'm usually not this bad anymore.

I'm glad to say most of the issues that plagued me as regards personal relationships have been resolved. Some, not much I can do. But it's not so painful these days. As I've gotten older I've realized that people can only do what they can do, and even with the best will they can muster, sometimes they fall short, sometimes they can't change. Anyway, I've learned not to fight with dead people anymore. You can't win. You can't lose, but you can't win.

I guess it's good to know I've made progress, but bad to know how annoying I can be.

So, I decided to pack up all of the books and throw them all away. I hope I'm not that man anymore, and I don't want to drag his notebooks around like Jacob Marley and his chained ledgers.

I once put a question to a Catholic group like this: If you died and went to Purgatory, and part of your rehab involved watching a movie of your life -- every minute of it, everything you did and said, all of it (it's Purgatory; you have all the time there is) (maybe you could fast-forward through sleeping and bathroom breaks) -- how would you feel about it?

I think you can tell a lot about someone by their answer to that question. Some people were all gung-ho. Yes! I'll bring an eternal bucket of popcorn! It's showtime! Others were more pragmatic. There will be painful memories but if that's the cost of heaven, I will pay it. And then there were those like me. No thank you very much and could I spend a thousand years scrubbing toilets instead?