Status Update: Finally.

This is a Sunday post, though a late one. So let us pray:

Father in Heaven, we give thanks to You for Your great glory. For the incredible beauty and complexity of the Earth, which You could burst as easily as a bubble and build again, a day being with You as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day. For the very cool, slow spring season we have had, and the hot weather the marvels of the Internet are sure to tell us someone else has had...

The Internet. Lord, we don't know whether it is good for us humans to have such a thing as the Internet, but some of us certainly do enjoy it. We want it to continue. Wherefore we pray, Lord, that You will defend it from the hubris of such as Microsoft, who in their greed, their vanity, their contempt for their customers, have inflicted upon us a season of confusion and discontent. If everyone who works for Microsoft were stricken with a strange new disease compelling him to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or else remain silent, that would undoubtedly serve the purpose, and watching it would undoubtedly give joy to those who have been robbed and defrauded by Internet Service Providers who know not whether they are coming or going.

I couldn't believe the jolly boys from the company had honestly intended to restore service here when they refused to reclaim the thing they said was a router, and put in a router that worked. I knew that the little bits of fluff at the telephone company had consistently displeased both of my grandmothers and my mother before me, and I never felt that they were doing their best to provide good service when I still used a phone, either. Such stupefyingly stupid service had to be intentional and discriminatory...I showed my sponsors a copy of an e-mail that asked them some questions to which they had not replied.

"Likely they don't know the answers," a sponsor said mildly. 

I had asked some questions at Wal-Mart. Nobody there knew the answers; but they were not "service professionals." They were minimum-hourly-wage types who were or ought to have been in high school. They whined that the store was in the process of hiring someone who could tell me whether a new device had a chance of working, but had not hired one yet. None of the stores within a half-hour's drive had hired such a person. 

"The store in Rogersville has one," they said.

"So, you can e-mail this person?"

"We're not allowed to use e-mail in the store."

"I don't suppose you're allowed to use the phone, either?" The receipts indicated that the manager still had one. "Aha! You, over there. You reached for something. They give youall cell phones now?"

"It's my own phone. But I'm not allowed to call other stores. We don't have their phone numbers. We can't look them up online, either. If customers have phones they can call the Rogersville store."

"I don't remember seeing a Wal-Mart when I was in Rogersville," I said. "Do you know how to get there?"

They did not. It's a small-and-smaller-town thing. The drive is only about thirty miles but nobody in Kingsport would admit knowing anything about Rogersville.

What I knew about Rogersville was that the sort of people with whom Mother did business when she had rental property there would not approve of the disreputable old truck that can get things up to my front gate, nor of the Goth-style driver. What I soon learned was that it was mutual. "I caaaan't go to Rogersville! I could go to Norton. Why don't you want to go to Norton?"

"Norton is twice as far from here as Rogersville is," I pointed out.

"Yes but I know people in Norton. I have errands to do and people to talk to up there. I don't mind going to Norton. I have nothing at all to do in Rogersville. Anyway you don't know where to find this store, and I don't know where to find this store. We'd probably use more gas looking for the store in Rogersville than going straight to the store in Norton."

So I sat on my cash and gave Wal-Mart a month to hire someone who knew the business. 

By the time I went back to look for the person who knew about the current state of the technology., everyone was in agreement. "The service maps change from day to day. You can look up an address and see which devices are supposed to work there--this week." 

Microsoft in their hubris had decreed that no computer so "old" as to be infested with Windows 10 would be able to connect to the Internet after October. Microsoft had also supplied the company with shiny new cables and boxes that were meant to replace routers. The company had been installing them wherever routers had to be replaced, and wherever else they had got to. People had bought all sorts of things that didn't work for them.

Hello? What's my city of choice, again? Washington. Who gave me my first grown-up job? Ralph Nader. Need I even say what I'm thinking?

We need laws. We need a law requiring the corporations to keep all intact electronic devices in service, indefinitely, toward the goal of reducing plastic waste and toxic waste with a policy of ONE ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATIONS DEVICE PER PERSON PER LIFETIME. (And even if someone were backward enough to want that device to be a phone, the manufacturer should have to supply it with a solid keyboard and a printer, free of charge.) We need a law not only preventing Microsoft from trying to force sales with these technological changes-for-the-sake-of-change (Microsoft Office has certainly not improved since...I know a few people who will allow Vista, but I say since Windows ME), but holding Microsoft responsible for "updating" the first and only computers people have bought, at Microsoft's expense. Seriously.

"Not a 1978 Tandy from Radio Shack! That little box never did connect to the Internet!" Microsoft employees should have to whine in court.

"If you want to sell your new "update," it will now!" a judge should tell them. On television.

Once in a while I would like to see our federal government earn its keep and protect hard-pinched students, not to mention underpaid writers, from creepy corporations who think people can be forced to buy things. 

We don't have that sort of federal government. Trump's not been a Christian long enough to have read the parts about oppressing the poor. We The People have to assert our own power. 

"You have to buy new computers! You have to! You HAAAFFF to!" Microsoft greedheads are dancing around, rubbing their hands together.

"No," we have to say loudly and clearly, keeping our hands on our money and all of them firmly in our pockets. "No, that's assuming we choose to keep the Internet going. Maybe we don't. A lot of us need jobs, and there were more jobs without the Internet."  

"You HAAAFFF to keep the Internet!" Bill Gates should personally be dragged out on camera to exhort my generation, who used to be his fans.

"Sez you, senile White man whom nobody loves," we should say back. "Libre Office cannot keep up with an Underwood typewriter. We are not even talking about Royal Standards or Smith-Coronas. We are talking about the Underwood. We want to bring back real typewriters and get some work done." 

Well, I made more money with a Royal Standard typewriter than I have with a computer. And I still have, I think, five of the original seven. I could do without the Internet. Probably I could do better without the Internet, economically, than with it. 

I'll miss it, though. I'm hoping that enough people are prepared to drop the Internet that Microsoft sees the error of its ways and publicly pledges to eliminate electronic waste by preventing obsolescence, Computers are subject to physical decay like everything else--the Original or Practically Perfect Toshiba really did crack while sitting on a shelf, and when taken to the shop its outer shell continued to crack and crumble, because it was made of plastic and it was forty years old. They will eventually reach a point where they do have to be recycled. But the corporations must be brought to heel, first by the customers, then by a law. They must not be allowed even to try to force sales. 

We must beware of the simple but wrong answer. "Here is an I-Pad," someone might beam. "It works with the new cable! It runs Windows 11! You can 'update' to an I-Pad!"

Hello? That silly thing doesn't even have a keyboard. Serious writing is not done by pawing at touch screens, even if, as a matter of national security, all North Americans didn't need to avoid ever touching any touch screen. Writers need separate keys we can feel under our fingers while looking at a vertical screen. So, actually, does anyone with any common sense. 

I expect, during the second half of this year, to receive a serious laptop that runs Windows 11. I expect to have a use for it; the Unsatisfactory Toshiba's memory is filling up. But I'm tired of piling up laptops because their memories are full or they "can't keep up with the Internet these days." The companies need to expand their memories and keep them up with the Internet. 

For the moment, for four more months if all goes well, the Unsatisfactory Toshiba is connected to a new device. The device was paid for by individuals whose screen names are not "Priscilla King." They know, the company know, and the police know, who needs to be kept indoors at night, to avoid suspicion.