Local health pundits advise that three distinct virus are travelling together this winter, collaborating to make the maximum number of people suffer the maximum amount of mild unpleasantness. There's a head cold virus, a weakened strain of coronavirus, and a flu-type virus.
I went into town last week and was exposed to the head cold virus...
It could have been worse. The reason for this trip into town was that my electricity went out, with a soft but audible pop as if a transformer had blown out about a city block away. Due to corporate greed I no longer have the option of trying to report a power outage with my faithful little cell phone, which would send messages if I walked to the right place. The company is really pushing clunkier, less serviceable phones, which I've taken a vow not to adopt. If the company wants my money they'll work with the phone that works for me. So I had to walk a little further to use someone's phone.
But whose? No really close neighbor has a phone, for the same reasons I do. People are boycotting the stupidphones. In the next little group of houses are two houses that I think still have traditional "land line" phones, but the yuppie types who live there aren't at home at 11:00 on a Tuesday. Then there's a subdivision in which I don't know anybody, or well I know I've met one resident who is still alive but I don't know which house is hers. The convenience store where those horrible people sent the cats to a shelter has been sold, again, to someone who's not open for business yet. The charity resale store may still have a land line phone, but it's always closed on Tuesdays. Then there are several blocks of houses in which I know several people who have had handy little cell phones, only, for years, and they're not taking stupidphones as a substitute either. Neither cell phone nor land line people are at home.
But there's the Grouch. He is Google's ideal customer for the stupidphone that doesn't actually do anything for you--it exists to allow other people to spy on you. Having no real purpose for whatever he does with his phone, he has time to play with all the "apps" Google keeps endlessly "updating" to collect more data about him, his fingerprints and what makes his hands perspire, his face and what he looks at longest, etc. etc. ad nauseam. I suspect he has a crush on "Alexa." I knocked on his door.
After a long time the door opened just a crack. A haggard unshaven face peered around the door. No move was made to unlock the storm door. "I've got COVID again," the Grouch rasped feebly. "Go away."
The convenience store ought still to have a land line. They didn't. The library opens late on Tuesdays. The lawyers used to have secretaries and paralegals keeping their offices open while they were in court, but now I think most of them are on one voicemail system. The hardware store used to have a land line but I'd heard they'd cut it off. None of the small stores would be likely to have a phone. The store that displays the pricier books reviewed at this web site does not have a phone. Did the gift shop still have a land line phone? I went in to ask. They didn't, but the owner of the building, who thinks it's important to her image to have whatever is new and trendy whether she knows how to use it or not, had left her stupidphone on the charger, enough hours ago that they were able to call the electric company.
The storekeeper had a school-aged child in the store. That would have been where the head cold virus came from. Children pick these things up at school. From an immunological point of view there was a lot to be said for keeping children at home until puberty so their immune systems could mature, then sending them to boarding schools so they could build immunity to airborne virus away from the rest of society.
Anyway I reported the outage to a young man, reported that it had lasted long enough for me to walk two and a half miles before I came to a working phone. The electric company has been out of touch with the way people actually do things for a while. They ought to have automated the power outage line to the point that one could simply text in the time and location of a power failure and get as much of a reply as a desk worker can give ("500 OTHER CALLS IN NEIGHBORHOOD, CREW WORKING ON BROKEN CABLE NOW" or "NO OTHER CALLS IN NEIGHBORHOOD, CREW DISPATCHED"). They've not done this.
But the young man actually said, "I don't know how relevant this is to you, but they make me ask...Would you like to download our app to your phone so you could receive messages about power outages?"
The storekeeper and a few shoppers could hear this. It was quite a laugh.
Where does one begin? The whole phone culture is dead, dear. It choked to death on greed. Kids and the sort of embittered retirees, like the Grouch, who think there's something liberating about having no goals or deadlines in their lives any more, may have time to play around with "apps" but responsible adults do not. If phone culture can be revived, companies need to think about how they are going to receive and respond to the customers' messages. Phone contact between companies and customers needs always to originate from the customers. It's not a company's place to call customers' attention to itself. This is a hierarchical relationship. It always was and it always will be. If you want to continue earning your living from being paid by customers, deal with it.
Y'know what I liked best about my little Tracfone, aside from the fact that the phone folded up to the same size as a dollar bill folded twice, and fitted into the same billfold in my pocket...I liked that in most of my part of the world, there are only certain locations where cell phones actually connect to wi-fi transmitters. People know where to walk to to pick up the signal when we want to send messages or check for expected messages. In winter random text messages from people like the Grouch, who have no better use for their time and money than to use cell phones to try to make conversation, would sometimes reach me on the day they were sent. Live calls almost never did. In summer almost no incoming messages came through unless I walked out looking for them. I was the one paying for the phone, and I was the one in control of how much the phone could distract me from my writing. I liked that feature. Never looked back. You'd have to pay me quite a lot to reconnect the old land line phone at the Cat Sanctuary.
The stupidphones' "unlimited calls and messages" feature is a bargain only for people who want to spend a lot more time making calls and sending messages than most of us do. Immune-compromised bedfast patients who do their entire social lives by phones might need to pay every month for unlimited calls but most of us can easily hold it down to less than an hour of phone time per month. But of course the stupidphones do seem to pick up "unlimited calls and messages." Nine out of ten of them seem to come from automated phishing systems purporting to sell insurance, and nine out of ten of the others come from pests. People I know who try to use stupidphones don't know how to make calls or send messages, as Google changes that every week or two, but they're getting all kinds of automated messages from corporations. "Download our app so we can send you messages"? Seriously. I wouldn't consider having a device that would receive that kind of messages for less than $250 per month, paid to me, in cash, between 6 and 7 a.m. on the morning of the first of the month.
The inanity of the electric company's shortsighted effort to push "apps," in a neighborhood where we don't do phones any more, left me speechless, quivering with silent derisive laughter. I barely remembered to thank the storekeeper for sharing the owner's phone.
Anyway, just before the sun went down, the electricity was reconnected, and life went on. On Thursday morning I felt tired, sneezed twice, ate my usual garlic clove and added a Vitamin C tablet, and that would have been the end of it if the glyphosate poisoning incident had not occurred on Thursday afternoon. Saturday and Sunday were warm days. I spent them sitting in a bundle of blankets and shawls, with the 200-watt heater at my feet, sweating out the cold.
Some extremely nice person had sent me a book from Amazon, earlier in the week, and the seller wanted a good service review on Amazon. Last time I checked, Amazon was still not posting actual reviews of products from people who hadn't spent $50 at that site with a credit card as distinct from a giftcard. Apparently the person who'd bought the book had done that and could at least rate the service, so how prompt was the service, they wanted to know, on Friday.
The book had not arrived on Tuesday, I replied. I'd go into town again this week and have another look.
Saturday night I checked messages online. (Doing my 24 hours of Net-freedom in the good old Seventh-Day Adventist way gives me a chance to read messages during the daytime on Friday and then on Saturday night.) The sender of the gift book had checked with the post office and verified that the book was waiting for me there, they wanted me to know.
Right. So in my current glyphosate-damaged condition, how much good could 48 hours of sweating-out have done?
I worked my usual night shift, got to bed about 5:30 a.m., woke up hearing the odd jobs man revving his engine as he drove past. 9 a.m. He had no idea whether I'd want a lift into town or not. Somebody was paying him to do something in the neighborhood today. If it was one of my cousins, he was being paid for a day in any case, but he'd just love to spend part of the day driving me around, or driving somewhere for me, and angling for an extra tip.
He's one of the last old coal miners who were laid off with black lung. I give him five-dollar jobs when I can, and don't ask whether he spends the extra money on trashy women (he claims to know a few, up around the mines) or beer or both. I did not have five dollars.
I sneezed, once. Only once, but it was still the watery kind of sneeze that means you're still shedding head cold virus. It was going to be another mild, sunny day, a good day for strolling around town and doing errands. I was going to spend it sweating out those last few holdout virus. The physical strain of walking out in the wind might cause me a little more coughing and sneezing. I could stand that. Coughing or sneezing in town might cause a panic, or even send some frail older person to the hospital. I did not want that.
The odd jobs man drove around a few neighbors' houses, off-loading feed sacks in this and that barn. I went outside as he headed back toward town.
I remembered him saying, "Don't come near me if you've been exposed to that virus! I've got black lung already. COVID might kill me."
"Go on!" I yelled, waving toward town. "I've had a cold! Go away!"
So, maybe I can walk to the post office tomorrow. Maybe this warm air will not have collided with more season-typical air to cause a rain or snow storm yet. Maybe, but this is still Virginia and you still have to plan on the weather doing whatever is most inconvenient. It's 53 degrees Fahrenheit at the weather station, T-shirt weather if you're walking in the sun. I am sitting indoors with a 200-watt heater at knee level, blasting hot air through the bundle of blankets and shawls.
I figure this is going to be a day of low-grade guilt trips, whatever I do, and the guilt trip I least want to take would be the one where I walk into town enjoying the beautiful weather, pick up the book, then feel just tired enough to start sneezing again. People who do not particularly care about me panic because they've spent two years hearing talking heads on television tell them that any of these silly little viruses is likely to kill someone. "Get that virus carrier out of here!" Someone in any crowd in this little town is likely to be an acquaintance of mine. With my luck it wouldn't even be the odd jobs man. It 'd be some dear little ninety-year-old church lady, and my head cold virus would give her fatal pneumonia.
It's not the other bookseller's fault, Amazon. It's mine. I still feel guilty, but this is a level of guilt with which I can live.
People employed in the technology industry think this kind of situation should no longer exist. In their minds everybody drives into town, probably in separate cars, every day and when their books reach the post office they go in and scan the code on the package into their stupidphones and...
In real life, even when people have stupidphones and have paid the monthly fee, nobody I know has yet been able to use one to scan a code. And I don't drive to the post office. And whatever schedules corporations may set for themselves, they still have to wait for customers to do things at our convenience, not theirs. You want people to go to the post office on the day something is delivered? You need to make an offer to pay those people for that. You need to pay us enough that we can afford to hire young, healthy drivers who don't have black lung, or AIDS, or COPD, or cancer, or lupus, or any other drain on their immunity, or live with anyone who does.
People Out There are actually organizing groups to resist the amount of, really, work the tech companies expect us to do for their benefit. Let Google jollywell pay us if Google wants to track our phone calls, some say.
And I say, if Verizon really wants just one more spasm of planned waste and damage-to-the-environment just to sell me one more phone, they'd better make sure it is even more tailor-made for the convenience of me as a writer than my little Tracfone was. Try no audible ringer, no picture screen or non-text input of any kind, and--this is not even negotiable--displaying the origin of all incoming text messages so I never again inadvertently open a message from B because I'm waiting for one from A.
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