And He's Off ... Again

Delia is sad and frustrated.

Derek is gone and his vacation didn't go the way she had visualized it. He left here without a hug from me or from his sister. Delia thinks affection must constantly be demonstrated in her sight and hearing for it to exist. She equated our casual departures as signs that we cared less for Derek than she does.

Cathy had left for work before Derek was out of bed. There was no chance for an emotional goodbye to be staged for Delia. Derek and Cathy are in frequent communication all of the time anyway, by email and cell phone, so they aren't really that far apart except in the physical dimension.

I am still in shock from losing my job. Even though I saw it coming, everything hits me harder in this time of the year. Derek and I had a couple of days together and it was comfortable, quality time. He didn't impose himself on me and I didn't feel obligated to entertain him. We just did stuff together and talked a bit. When we dropped him at the airport, I felt getting out from behind the wheel for a hug was not only unnecessary but would have placed unwanted strain on my knees at an awkward time. I no longer light from a car, I heavy from one. I compensated with what I hope was an adequate expression of my feelings.

Derek has now gotten as far as Chicago. He has promised to return next year ... and probably will. Delia will probably see him in January in Panamá. But she misses him now.

And she misses not having seen the shows of affection she expected to see, which probably hurts her more.

Happy Thanksgiving

Derek has been planning his visit home for some time. He bought his airline tickets and his Charger game tickets weeks ago, if not months ago. He kept asking me if I would be able to take time off from work, at least one day, so he would see me while he was here. I couldn't say whether I would be working or without a job.

Starting early last week, the company I've been working for as a Customer Service Representative started letting people go. Nothing was said officially but the rumor was that they were going to disband the entire Technical Support staff and assign our duties to the engineering staff. The rapid disappearance of people last week led support to the rumors but I received no official word up to the end of my shift on Sunday, at midnight. I didn't hear anything on Monday, either.

Tuesday morning at 9:50, just as I was leaving the house, I received the call. I was no longer employed. I was officially notified that the department I had been working for no longer existed.

I decided to take the whole week off and start my job search next week, after Derek leaves on Tuesday.

By the way, we tried Derek's jalapeño wine after a super Thanksgiving dinner. It had an alcohol content he estimates at 12.4%, a bit stiffer than I preferred to make my wines, but it was dry with a good body. It retains almost all of the distinctive jalapeño taste and has a good deal of bite to it, too. There is a flavor shift right after you take a mouthful, making the taste quite complex and difficult to describe. It is pleasant for sipping by itself but I am somewhat at a loss as to what it might go well with: perhaps a full flavored creamy cheese or one of the milder blue cheeses, perhaps dates, figs and nuts, or perhaps a dried or smoked meat (not supermarket jerky, though). It is good stuff.

Cathy got out her big marble pestle and ground some whole spices, the exact mixture a secret (probably to her, too, by now), to make a really, really good soup from some small pumpkins she roasted. She also raided the cabinets and closets, the freezer and refrigerator for ingredients for her dressing. She had everything from bacon and pork sausage, pine nuts, chestnuts, cashews, apricots and prunes to sage and anise seeds in there. Frankly, it is one of the best dressings I've had. She melted butter into a couple of cups of brandy and we spent some time injecting the mixture into the bird before stuffing it; I would fill the syringes and she would empty them into the bird. Needless to say, the turkey tasted good, too.

Delia did her standards (squash purée, a string bean dish, mashed fresh potatoes, pan fried sweet potatoes), things she always does well and that always taste -- not just good, but special. She also made some corn bread from a mix.

Apart from running errands and doing some heavy lifting, I mostly stayed in the background. I chopped a lot of onions, garlic, celery and giblets for the various dishes. The only thing I did all by myself was the gravy, which is basically just tedious. I carved the bird for the meal, then stripped the remaining meat off of the bones after the meal so Delia could freeze the bones for soup. I also packed the leftovers so they would mostly fit into the refrigerator when the meal was done.

Cathy has been exploring pumpkins this year. Her earlier attempt to make a pie from pumpkins didn't work too well because she used a big pumpkin. She learned that the sweet little pumpkins are better for cooking. She made two pumpkin pies, crust and all from scratch, using real pumpkins and not some kind of mix, and they were super. She also cleaned and roasted the seeds for a special extra treat.

They could have prepared the meal without me. When I first met Delia -- even when the kids were in their early teen years -- I basically had to do almost everything. At first the rest of them were afraid to fix a turkey. Now either Derek or Cathy could do one alone. Delia could probably fix the whole meal with very little help if she had to or wanted to, although the turkey might cook too long and the dressing might be a bit plain. Derek wouldn't know what else to serve besides the turkey and dressing (but he would watch all of the football games); Cathy would know but would want to experiment with new stuff.

For the moment, I have time on my hands and the chance to pause and count my blessings.

Park Coon

Within a week of starting to work here, I was aware there was an adult raccoon in the park-like area within the technical center that also houses the microbrewery restaurant. I had seen his footprints and, later, heard his call.

Tonight I saw him.

I first spotted him about 80 feet away when he stood to hug a tree. I could see his dark outline against the lighted buildings behind him. He vanished for a moment as he moved towards me. He pulled up the piece of rope used to mark the boundry of the volleyball court and was playing with it, about thirty feet from me, when he noticed me eating my lunch on my stone bench in the dark.

He immediately started over to investigate. As tame as he seemed, he is still a wild animal, so I warned him off when he was less than ten feet from me. He headed up the hill towards the exercise room, which is also the general direction of a trash barrel and the restaurant.

I have been told that two raccoons have been seen fighting in the area but I have only seen evidence of one.

This is not a wilderness area. While it isn't downtown, it is in an industrial / technical area of a major city. This animal was well fed, healthy and fearless, almost friendly (if he could be trusted). In the same area I have seen many rabbits, a couple of owls and some crows. Others have seen mice. I suspect there are also rats and either foxes or coyotes that if not actually living here pay regular visits here. I've seen no sign of dogs or cats in the area. Nor skunks.

These are the creatures that are habituated to living with humans.

Adventures in Support

Support is more than dealing with customers. We also have to deal with hardware and software, networks, the economy and the weather. But the customers get most of our attention. They make the noise and they are the source of our income (a fact not lightly to be ignored or forgotten).

Today was different. I've been screamed at a few times, but today for the very first time I received two email messages thanking me. One just said thanks but the other elaborated a bit. In neither case had I done anything more than relay the information that the engineers had done their job and fixed the problem. I had to let the engineers know that the customers appreciated their effort, so I printed the message and delivered it to them. They were talking about having it framed, never previously having seen a message thanking them for their efforts.

I didn't really solve a lot of problems today. I solved a few small ones. The big problems I participated in I was mostly a bystander carrying bits and pieces of the puzzle back and forth between those who knew what they were doing and, of course, the customer. I was distracted by having to tend to other customers, live, wanting access to equipment. I was supposed to be in the Operations Control Center (OCC) but wound up wandering all over the building seeking help, then finally talking to the customer while juggling Instant Messages to several other people who were fixing things. In the end the customer was no longer mad and I was a total wreck.

But normally I would receive a call or a message, figure out what was needed, go to whoever could provide the fix, and report back to the customer that a fix had been made. I don't usually have that luxury. I usually have to do all of the fixing myself instead of getting all of the credit for the work of others.

I've spotted a few trends. When a customer starts to describe a problem to me, I can often tell them what operating system they're running and what software is causing the problem. The first one I hit on was the connection between a certain error message and the use of Netscape 4.x on Windows 9x systems; it happens when the program stores exactly 2048 items in its temporary storage and I've been advising victims of the problem to upgrade to a higher version of Netscape.

The most recent trend is that when we have a glitch customers whose operating system is Windows XP find that their system has changed important parameters and they can no longer access their email. We are adding new mail servers to handle the increased load due to new customers, increased spam and a whole lot of virus infection attempts passing through, and every time we move a server, the XP customers start calling in because they can no longer get their mail. Should I tell them to thank Bill?

I've been using a few XP systems lately. They set up a lot of stuff automatically ... and usually wrong. It takes me longer to figure out how the OS has screwed up and fix it than it would have taken me to set it up from scratch myself. Many of my customers are at a complete loss what to do, so I've had to debug their systems by remote control, mostly using guesswork. It's a time-consuming process that's only partly effective.

And it only works until the next time XP decides to make changes on its own.

That's a real accomplishment, you know. It isn't every company that can write a program that nearly always makes the wrong decisions, then makes changes when your back is turned to enforce its bad guesses. It takes a company like Microsoft.

An example? A customer called up for an initial dial-up setup. We went through all of the procedure and it didn't work. Going back and examining the settings, we discovered that the settings XP had used when the customer had registered his computer had been substituted for the settings we had just entered. When you first start an XP system, it wants you to register it with its masters, and it knows how to make the telephone connection for that purpose. When you try to set up any other telephone connection afterwards, XP becomes unhappy and restores the settings it wants.

Bad XP.

Still, if you must get a new computer, seriously consider getting an operating system represented by a penguin, even one wearing a red hat.

Today started off like magic. One customer called in that he had tried to arrange to pay his bill by phone and get his Web site unlocked but it still seemed to be unavailable. I put him on hold. In the hallway I ran into the chief accountant, who said he had just sent the account to the engineers for activation. When I got to the engineers, Turbo said he had activated the account thirty seconds previously. I was back on the phone to the customer in just over a minute, able to tell him the problem had been taken care of. It took him longer than that to verify that it had been.

Nothing else was any easier than that.

What a pity. But it's been a much better than average day.

The Down Side of Working

A Very Unpopular Shift

When I applied for this job I offered to work evenings and weekends. I got the job because of my willingness to do so. I work the swing shift, 15:00 to midnight, on Wednesday through Sunday.

Most of the technicians working with me are young people who want to party on Friday and Saturday nights. Having me there allows them to do so.

There aren't very many of us, just enough to provide coverage all day, every day, plus a bit for training and emergencies.

Once, the person who works graveyard shift, midnight to 8:00, had to take off his usual Saturday and Sunday slots. Our supervisor asked me to fill in for him. At first I refused because of my health. Then, knowing that I wasn't sure how badly it would affect my health, I reluctantly agreed to fill in.

It was worse than I expected. I am incapable of functioning at those hours.

The surprise was that the other technicians were upset that I had been taken off of my regular Friday, Saturday and Sunday shifts to do it ... and they had been asked to fill in for me.

They would rather do the graveyard than the swing. I can manage the swing but not the graveyard, but I wasn't doing the complaining. As long as I would cover those three nights, my fellow technicians didn't want my supervisor changing my schedule.

Call it job security. I was surprised that it became an issue, but I did expect to have to work at unpopular times in order to keep the job -- times like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Eve.

My family is upset with me. They think I can ask for Thanksgiving off. I can get Thanksgiving off -- by quitting -- but if I want to continue working there, I had better plan on working there at the hard times.

As I knew would happen when I applied for the job.

I'm not young. I've made mistakes, although many of the customers like me. They've called my bosses to tell them so. The work isn't hard or demanding or tedious, although some of the customers get frustrating. The pay isn't very good, but I'm doing it more to fill the gap in qualifying for Social Security than for the pay itself (working for the federal government didn't count towards my Social Security).

I only have to last a few years, not make a career of it.

It All Works!

At A Nice High Speed

Windows 98SE started up with the new setup just as easily as Lindows did yesterday. To prove it, I downloaded the latest version of Mozilla and then deleted Netscape 7.1, which was flaky and annoying. This was written from Mozilla 1.4 through Windows using the high speed connection.

High-Speed Lindows

I'm currently using the high speed link with Lindows. What surprised me is that I didn't have to do anything! I simply brought the system up and it recognized the LAN connection and used it.

It was all completely automatic.

Linux High-Speed Connection

Working At Last

Actually, I gave up trying to get the Wireless USB device to work with either flavor of Linux, despite the fact that I was making progress under Mandrake Linux. I sent off for a different kind of device instead.

The problem is USB. It isn't designed for block transfers like a parallel device normally does. It does its thing serially. Universal <strong>Serial</strong> Bus -- that's what it is. It's nice that you can plug it into lots of different devices and have it recognized, but even Windows was having problems with USB as an interface to a wireless LAN connection.

So I got an ordinary NIC (Network Interface Connector) and tied it to a wireless bridge. All of the configuration, the little bit that is required, happens in the bridge, controlled through a browser. That is, the setup is controlled through a browser. Once it is set up, it stands alone, ready to go. It just sits there, happily connecting between my wireless router and the new NIC on my computer.

I configured the bridge to talk directly to the Internet as if there were no other computers connected to the router. That made configuration of the Linux simple: I just told it that it was connected to a cable modem with DHCP capabilities, as if the router didn't exist, and the software bought this fiction. It didn't need to know about the router's security protocols or internal IP addressing setup at all. Everything but the cable modem is invisible to the computer. It thinks it is directly connected from the moment I turn the power on.

I hope it will be equally simple to convince Lindows to talk high-speed to the Internet. Lindows resisted all of my attempts to compile a wireless USB driver, being even more stubborn than Mandrake. With so simple a scheme, though, there is hope I can get even Lindows going again.

And if Windows gives me any problems I can always continue to use the existing wireless USB device, however inconvenient that may prove to be.

I only had a few minutes to test Mandrake Linux with the high speed connection but it was able to connect to several Web sites, ample evidence that it works.

Telephone Headsets

I am a touch typist. Ever since I started high school I have used two hands to type with. Being restricted to one typing hand by having to hold a telephone in my other hand is highly annoying.

You must understand the I dislike using telephones to begin with. That is why so many people, especially my wife, are surprised that I took a job that requires my being on the telephone all day long. But, like Quigley, I may despise the instrument but that doesn't make me incapable of using it -- especially if I can wear it instead of holding it, thereby freeing up my other hand.

I absolutely dislike those little ear buds that you just hang in your ear. They have a tendency to fall out at the most inopportune times, and I can't afford to lose contact at the wrong time. I have problems enough as it is. Besides, my ears sweat, making the buds very uncomfortable in a very short time.

The various devices for hanging an earphone on your ear are just as bad and even more uncomfortable, the discomfort simply being concentrated behind the ear rather than inside it. No, I wanted something that used my head as a base and preferably delivered the sound to both ears rather than to just one. Such devices do exist.

Now to complicate the problem slightly. The phones we have in the business area have standard handsets with an extra connector for a headset ... provided the headset uses a handset connector. Meanwhile, the phones in OCC, the operations center we use at night, are wireless with 2.5 mm connectors for headphones. Almost all of the amplifiers / adapters for standard office phones use a proprietary headphone connector unlike anything else. It appeared I was going to have to get two complete sets of headphones, one for each area.

On Monday I wandered into Fry's to check out their selection, having already exhausted Radio Shack, Staples and the Internet as possible suppliers. Actually, I went there to buy a NIC for my computer, but I was interested in the phone stuff. Most of the systems Fry's stocked were the same as the ones advertised on the Web -- overpriced and physically oversized, yet using AAA batteries -- but they were unpacking and stacking up a new device by Netcom.

This new machine, what I could see of it in its oversized plastic bubble, seemed large and ugly. I bought one anyway, probably because it was the only thing that used AA batteries.

Today, at work, I finally unpacked the thing ... despite having forgotten to bring batteries. No problem. Batteries were included. The headphones, which converted from an eargrabber to an over the head band, connected to the amplifier with a 2.5 mm plug, much to my amazement. The amplifier will connect to phones, computers or to both simultaneously. It is the only device I've seen with a reasonable layout of controls, although I'll only use a few of the functions available to me. And it isn't as big as it seemed because of the packaging. There's even a place to rest the headphones (in either configuration) and a super strong double sided tape was provided that allows the assembly to be mounted to a monitor or other convenient location.

Oh, and it works.

Bad Lunch

Just before coming in to work, I had lunch. Delia had prepared a couple of pieces of chicken thigh with a piece of red bell pepper and some onion. I don't know how long it had been sitting there, but it was cool when I ate it.

I had diarrhea shortly after I arrived in the office. I've felt miserable ever since, with a headache, chills, confusion and a general feeling of misery, all typical of mild food poisoning.

Food doesn't have to sit long to become hazardous to your health.

Eating some crackers has helped a little, as has drinking a bit of tea. I have less than ninety minutes left to go. It has been a quiet night so far, but things always pick up at about 23:00, when our contract customers start calling in. They will have a shot at us for nine hours, but only one hour of that is on my shift.

Except on weekends. Then we have to serve them for the whole shift ... and that's when I'm here alone for the four or five hours before midnight.

Saturday nights bring their own special problems, too. That's when the lonely drunks call in.

That would be all I'd need tonight. I'd be out of here.

I wasn't sure I'd last this long.

Now it's down to eighty minutes.