Since the blogger doesn't reveal the author at the top of the article I try to figure out who has written the article by content and style. I have to say Beagles's weather report sounded a lot like what we had here. Except for the snow part. Maybe a couple times I looked out the window and it was white and heavy and I was hoping against hope that the weatherman's prediction of no accumulation expected would prove to be false, but when I looked again it was gone. There has been no snow in January or February here in Chicago, the first time ever since the white man or red man can remember.
Yep Cortana, is wanting to run your life, make you dependent on all her fussy little calendars and whatnot so that you cannot live without her. Remember that stupid movie where the guy falls in love with his operating system, thought-provoking I believe was an adjective used by the critics, and it was just a romcom like the gazillion other romcoms (LaLaLand, ugh), Hollywood cranks out like once a week. A better representation of automation is Bender from Futurama, he hangs around with his human buddies a bit, but when he gets together with his robot buddies it's death to all the humans. Cortana will be lighting the candles and putting Johnny Mathis on the box and just outside the door will be Bender with an axe trying to stifle his chortle.
Well I see where that awful Sessions who wants to whack on weed (shades of the sixties and the pigs vs the freaks) has seemingly got his teat in a wringer over speaking to Boris and Natasha. I say seemingly because while the dems will howl bloody murder, the reps, who hold all the levers of power, will just go tut tut, my good man nothing to look at here, no need to look into this when the real investigation should be of those traitors trying to hurt Dump's feelings.
Ah politics, you know I often wonder how it is that Beagles and I, both intelligent guys of course could come out of the same environment and a few years later he is signing up for the John Birch Society and I am hawking the Berkeley Barb on Telegraph Avenue. We assume Old Dog is also an intelligent guy, but he grew up in that alien land across Madison Avenue, and I have never quite been able to figure out his politics, a contrarian maybe with a soft spot for exotic theories.
This is all prologue for an article in the feb 27 New Yorker, Are we thinking straight by Elizabeth Kolbert, which sort of addresses this issue which I'd like to bring into our discussion. I should be able to provide a link and I think I can copy and paste it into a journal entry or maybe just email as an attachment (it's not as long as that other article). But not this morning, because I wasn't sure if there would be anybody at the Beaglestonian this morning and am primed to continue Uncle Ken in Texas.
So I learned Lotus. See back in the day when you learned some computer thing you thought it was like learning geography, now you knew where every place was and you could put it in your old kit bag and get on with your life. The ugly Bender/Cortana truth is that you are riding a tiger and if you take your eyes away from it for a couple weeks you become that grandma who never touched the VCR unless the grandkids were around.
Anyway the muckety mucks were impressed that I knew Lotus. Not impressed enough to put me in the data processing crew, but there was the office supply division way out on one of those outer belt highways, that maybe could be run a little better. Not by me of course, I have already recounted my career in management, but there was an enterprising guy out there by the name of Chet Tutor who wanted to tear the supply division a new asshole and figured maybe those new-fangled computers could be of use.
The place was indeed a backwater, boxes of stuff here, boxes of stuff there, the red pens over here, the blue pens across the room, if the office in Del Rio asked for blue pens and there were maybe three kinds of blue pens well whichever was in the nearest box would be heading west to the Rio Grande. Items did not have a unique identifying number. Imagine that. Uncle Ken went right to work on his spreadsheet. Chet Tutor, who became my second mentor, went about tearing that new asshole by putting up walls, making shelves, he was happy just making things rather than being a bureaucrat.
Not only did I create that spreadsheet but I wrote a whole database in Basic where the AG offices across the state could order their supplies from a floppy, blip, blip, blip. It was pretty cool. I was flown on the AG's official plane from Austin to Dallas to a big pow wow of AG offices to show off my shiny disk. I was riding high.
Not for long though, Chet, my mentor had been aiming for the bigger boss's job (A guy named Morris, but I thought it was Mars because that is the way Texans pronounced it), and he didn't quite make it and he got canned. My cool supply disk was not cool enough to get me in with the data processing guys, and the next thing I knew I was being shunted to the equipment department who shared the building with us so I knew first hand that they were a bunch of clowns.
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