Suzanne’s post about her phone trying to … Well, I don’t want to spoil it. Her post had me laughing with sufficient joy that I had to share it with my wife. Partly it’s because Suzanne is a wonderful writer and this is hilarious, but also because we’ve experienced these things with our phones and Alexa and other computer and technology that’s supposed to be helpful but often seems to be messing with us. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Thirstaz Wandering Thoughts
My thoughts are wandering as I sit in the Pittsburgh Airport, looking out at the rain, eavesdropping on others’ conversations. Most of my focus keeps shifting to Mom’s paperwork. Her paperwork is just like our paperwork.
Pulling out every bill from 1998 on, I laugh. Notes are on sheets of paper and bills. Who was spoken to, time and date, result. Most simply end like that. No further updates. There are insurance and banking papers, visits to hospitals, doctors, and specialists, and the ever-present pile of warranties.
We are the same back home. For the last how many decades, paperwork was needed for ‘just in case’ reference. Bills and payment records could go wrong, and it was incumbent on us to prove what we did. Even then, that sometimes isn’t enough and required we the customer to scale the corporate ladder past the drones and managerial kings and queens until a person was reached who could overrule the bureaucracy.
The paperwork at Mom’s has some interesting personal choices. Lot of paper clippings for things done by her children back in 1970 through 2010. Yellowed, brittle clippings of newspaper death notices for family members and friends. Crisp sheets of white papers in file folders with emails from family printed out. Things from me from my last days in the military in 1995. Travel information for visits in 1998, 2005, etc.
Mom is now battling Verizon. We’ve all been involved in this fight. It’s classic enshittification. Gotta sign in to do anything with them. Calling them? Hahahahaha. What a joker you are. Should be a stand up with your own HBO or Netflix comedy special. Calling them provided us with a window when it would be okay to call them. Mom had it down to fifteen minutes and counted it down to one, phone in hand, doing little else. The appointed minute arrived. Mom moved her hand. “Oops.” Gone! Her new wait time to reach them was eight hours later.
Meanwhile, we parsed Mom’s crazy notes for userIDs and passwords. Several were found for Verizon. None worked. One sister then went through the ‘Forgot Password’ route and tried to change the password. Hahahahahaha. Easier to turn an apple into a ruby.
This is modern life, yeah? At least in first world America, and maybe only among my family. I, of course, cheat. I maintain a spreadsheet of passwords. 112 lines. They’re for my accounts and my wife’s accounts. If that thing ever falls into the wrong hands, it’d be disaster for us. It’s encrypted and password protected. Every time I go in for surgery, I remind my wife of the password.
All of this has cause us to resolve, do a pare down. Purge paperwork and warranties. Get ruthless about it, and damn the consequences.
Seasons
Breaking away from writing, I step out for a walk. The sun has warmed us to a comfortable level. I stride along, nodding and saying hello to others encountered.
A shineless brown hot rod comes along. Roadster. Something out of the forties. Driven by a man who looks like he also originated in the forties, and a woman who might be a little younger, maybe even his daughter, as a passenger, bundled up in heavy clothes.
Putting along at 20 MPH, he guides the car to the side and waves a following vehicle past. Silver SUV, its twenty something driver gooses it faster. An electric vehicle, it glides by with a rising brash hum.
The scene on a small-town street seems so perfectly emblematic of change. Trees and their colors tell of the season changing around us, and there goes an old internal combustion car of a kind rarely seen, passed by an electric car, of the kind now commonly encountered.
Reality couldn’t have been better staged.
Sundaz Wandering Thoughts
This is just a weird household fact. Weird isn’t even the right word. Really, just something noted.
Here in our household, the clothes washer is just called the washer, or the washing machine. But the dishwasher is always fully said with both words, even though it’s been morphed into one. Examples:
“I’m going to put some stuff into the washer and do a load.” That would be the clothes washer.
“Should we turn on the dishwasher?” Self explanatory.
And now, as I’m writing it out to understand what I think about this, I see how much context plays into the whole scheme. Like, we don’t collect dirty clothes into the washer and then announce that we need to do a load. No, that’s all more systematic. We put the dirty clothes into a wheeled basket. When it’s full or one of us has a specific need for something to be washed.
I’d attributed it to our upbringing. I’m 69. My wife is a year younger. Her family never had a dishwasher. Dishes were always washed by hand. My family acquired their first dishwasher when I was eleven. Mom bought it on sale at Sears for Mother’s Day. So I thought that my wife and I grew up with clothes washers but dishwashers came later. Hence the difference.
Could be a bit of both, I suppose. As a final aside, my wife announced on Friday, “I’m going to wash clothes. Do you need to put anything in there? I’m doing darks.”
“No, I have nothing.”
I went off and did something in the other room. When I came back, she accosted me. “We had so many dirty clothes that I had to split it up into two loads.” She gestured back at the machine. “Why are you wearing so many clothes? Where are you going? What are you doing?”
“I’m just following the norm,” I replied. “You know, clean shirt, clean underwear, clean socks. Just one of each a day. Except socks. I wear a pair of them. I usually wear my pants a few times before washing them.”
“You need to be less clean,” she replied.
I laughed. Being told to be ‘less clean’ was definitely a first.
Mundaz Wandering Thoughts
This is a first world issue. First world blues. It’s about the ‘do-nothing’ loop. And enshittification.
We have an Epson printer. Bought it about a year ago. Replaced the big old Brother printer we’d had for over a decade. We often struggled with it. No; it often struggled to do what we wanted it to do. We wanted it to print on demand. We thought that’s what it was designed to do. Now I know otherwise. These printers aren’t designed to print. They’re designed to bring in revenue as products when they’re sold. After that, fuck you, you’re on your own.
So, Yellow-Magenta-Cyan are not printing on the Epson. That’s essentially the basis of color printing. I’ve gone through updates. Nozzle power cleans. Test printing to a sickening point. Nothing changes the YMC outcome. Yes, there’s ink in there. First thing I checked.
The enshittification really begins with the support. It’s a beautiful do-nothing loop. If it doesn’t print, clean nozzles. Then test. If it doesn’t print again, turn off for twelve hours. Try again. Here are some more helpful things.
None of the ‘more helpful things’ offer an iota of help. They’re just not what’s going on with our printer. And clicking on some just take me
Okay, let’s ask them for support. To get support, I need to the serial number.
Where is the serial number?
On the bottom of the printer, of course!
It’d be too damn easy to put it on the front, top, rear, or other two sides. No, no, no, let’s go full enshittification. Let’s put it on the bottom. Because, see, printers have ink. They shouldn’t be turned upside down. So, that makes it very difficult to get the serial number required for support, so win-win for them, they save on support costs!
What enshittification geniuses!
Hmmm, let me see what AI says about turning my printer upside down.
Me Against the Machine!
TL/DR: I lost again.
I received a paper check in the mail. After posting it to the wall for action for ten days, I launched myself to the credit union to make a deposit at the ATM. After processing it all, pressing the right buttons, and answering their questions, the machine told me with an exclamation point, “Invalid Transaction!”
“How the fuck is that an invalid transaction,” I muttered at the screen. It didn’t answer.
Well, one failure is a fluke. Two is a coincidence. Three is a trend as a failure. I did it four times. Fed the check into the machine four different ways. Always came back, “Invalid Transaction!”
It’s not me, I consoled myself. Has to be the machine. Still, it did sting to walk away a failure.
1982
I’ve lived without a computer before. It actually wasn’t terrible. Yes, I’m now spoiled. Personal computers have been life changing.
But jump back to 1982. I was in the U.S. Air Force, stationed at Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, an island that belongs to Japan. Commodore’s VIC 20 had us abuzz about computers. While we could easily see how it would make many things easier, shopping wasn’t yet on the menu. Nor was getting news updates. It was only toward the end of 1983 that I began learning about the concepts of ‘bulletin boards’, the Internet, and the worldwide web.
So back then, we watched television. Movies were watched via VHS tapes. That was the latest, greatest tech move for us, and such devices were still running close to $1,000. But we had one to help us weather the lack of entertainment inherent in being overseas. Remember, this was before satellite TV, too, for all practical purposes. All that stuff was just coming out, as were microwave ovens. They were also huge, bulky, expensive machines, but we purchased on of those, as well.
It’s hard to believe how fast everything changed. In late 1983, I bought my first CD player. It played one CD at a time. Returning to the U.S. from Japan, we gave our VHS player to my wife’s parents, and bought ourselves a new, smaller one with more features, including a remote control. That was the same year that I bought my first computer, a small but heavy Kaypro. Running at 4.77 megahertz, with a tiny green screen, it ran on CP/M and offered minimal RAM and two floppy drives that used 5 1/4 inch disks. It was a wild scene. We learned how to add RAM, make things faster, and double our floppy disks’ storage. Ten megahertz machines were being touted as possibilities, along with 64K of RAM and a 5-meg hard drive and 16 color monitors! Wow!
Back before that, we read. A lot. Books were checked out from the library, and research was done at the library. I subscribed to multiple magazines, such as Writer’s Digest, Autoweek, and Road & Track. Went for walks, played sports, read newspapers, which were delivered daily. When I lived in San Antonio, Texas, I subscribed to both the San Antonio Light and the Wall Street Journal. Even with the computer and VHS player coming along, and the CD player, and DVD players, most of that didn’t change. We still visited malls to shop, and used Sears and Spiegel catalogues to make orders, calling in to toll free numbers to put the order in. Board games like Risk, Life, and Monopoly were popular with us, along with Trivial Pursuit, and card games like Tripoli and King on the Corner, and Solitaire.
No, the big change came when the Internet finally fired up. My experience with it began in 1991, when I came back from Germany. Slow as hell, to be sure. Connections through modems which had to be hooked up. LOL. That changed fast, too, as built-in modems came along. I was both a Compuserve and AOL subscriber. Email was a new, exciting idea.
Then, suddenly we went to 256 colors and beyond on our monitors. The mouse became popular. 100 megahertz machines were being sold. I remembered buying and installing a 100-meg hard drive, and laughing. How was I ever going to use that much storage? It seemed so excessive. By then, our floppy drives were down to three-inch little colorful things. Now, we’re like, floppy drive? What the heck is that?
Going online was a wild scene back in the mid 1990s. Weren’t many websites in those early days. The games were something else. Research, news, and sports all became much more accessible. Then, boom…social media. That’s when things really flipped.
I’ve gone a few days in 2025 without my computer and without the Internet. Like before, we read, played games, and went for walks.
Just like it was 1982, just forty years ago, when I was younger, and so was the personal computer.
Sundaz Theme Music
So we have come to another Sunda. This is September 14, 2025. Thirty days hath September (just checked in my head), so tomorrow reaches the month’s halfway point. With the month’s end, we dip into 2025’s final quarter. It’s 65 F. Rain is in the clouds competing with the sunshine. Wind and trees are into a brisk dance.
Autumn is making solid inroads into our Pacific Northwest outlook. Today’s high will drift toward the mid seventies. My wife said, “I don’t mind it if the temperature drops but I dislike it when it’s so dark in the morning. I miss the morning light.” I totally get that and agree. As she went on to point out, the daylight savings situation doesn’t help, with us facing longer hours of early darkness as we begin our days.
My wife and I are trying to plan a trip back home for Mom’s 90th birthday do. However, my spouse said she experienced flashes of light in her eyes the other day as we went around Crater Lake and descended. She wants to have our eyes checked for problems before committing to flying. She’s not had incidents since that day, a week ago yesterday, and it was storming that day, with thunder and lightning. But she’s quite risk adverse. Having her eyes checked is the prudent thing to do.
I read a Politico piece titled, Trump loves AI, and the MAGA world is getting worried. It’s an interesting topic. I’m not surprised MAGA is generally against AI, as they tend to be people who dislike change and are slow to embrace technology. AI promises both fast change, and it’s advanced technology. Of course, Hollywood and television has fed us a dystopian diet of dire developments from AI. We have fears laced with worries baked into our cultural soul.
Other than that, I turned away from the news. It’s Sunda, a slow news day by design in the digital age. It’s more of a day of recap and reflection. I decided I’d do the same. I don’t know how the rest of the world does these things, but I’ll do it with a cuppa coffee, do some writing, read a book, clean, and converse with my wife. It feels like a good chillin’ day.
I dreamed of many cats last night. As I was digesting all that nocturnal churn, Papi and I went out for an early dose of sunshine and deep breathing. That ginger floof acted kittenish, galloping about, tail swishing, and then bounding into the house and across the rooms as I walked in behind him and laughed at his antics. With the sunshine and Papi’s attitude affecting them, The Neurons burst into the morning mental music stream with “Beautiful Day”. This is a U2 song from 2000, before this mess in America flared to its aggravating proportions. I played a U2 melody yesterday. Normally, I don’t present music from the same group two days in a row but this one worked for the moment, and I let Der Neurons’ choice stand.
Coffee has made incursions into my body. May grace and peace be with you and me and the world today and always. Cheers
Mundaz Wandering Thoughts
I read about a new scam targeting Paypal users.
Your PayPal Account Is Under Attack If You See This Message
Well, I’m a Paypal user. I received that message. I immediately deleted it.
I wasn’t being brilliant. I usually don’t complete or make the user profile that services, accounts, and apps want. They’re often asking for information that I don’t want to share. Screw that, is my heartful, enduring attitude toward such entreaties.
In this case, it might have saved me. Or maybe, I think, it really saved me again. I’m frequently urged to finish my profile, create a profile, or update a profile. As far as I’m concerned, they deserve and need what I gave them, and nothing more.
And nothing more is what they’re going to get.
Thistdaz Wandering Thoughts
I’m on vacation. Away from home. Know what that means? Of course, you immediately reply, “It means that your bank will no longer recognize your computer.”
I wanted to ensure certain deposits had been received. They were due from the Federal gubmint. Due to my distrust of this current direction of said gubmint, I just decided to allay concerns, log on, and check them.
“We don’t recognize this device,” the bank’s website exclaimed. “We want to send you a code to your email address attached to this account. Enter the code here.”
Sigh. Okay. I’ve been through this sock hop before. Go log into the account, which is actually my wife’s account. Can you guess what happened?
“We don’t recognize this device,” the email’s website exclaimed. “We want to send you a code to your other email address you listed. Enter the code here.”
Oh, bother. Logged into the other email account, which is also my wife’s. Note: all this was being done in the name of the joint account which we designate as belonging to my wife.
“”We don’t recognize this device,” the email’s website exclaimed. “We want to send you a code to your other email address you listed. Enter the code here.”
GRRRRR and double-GRRRRR. Screw it, I told The Neurons. This will wait until I get home next week.
Just another first world rant.
I’m off for coffee.
Michael Seidel, writer 