Chapbook

[sasha]

It's fortunate you're mechanically inclined enough to navigate that territory with some conficence - I'm a mechanical idiot, an unrecontrucated klutz....

I've got an oil-fired forced hot air system, & until 2014 was running the same furnace since the house was built (1974, I think). For years, I nursed it along "for just one more season", until the exhaust pipe rusted through right next to the air inlet. The furnace was so old the parts weren't even manufactured any more. The tech said he "might be able to cobble something up", but now it was a safety issue, so I bit the bullet & replaced the furnace outright. A week later, I burned out my water pump (forgot that I even had a water filter, & had allowed it to silt up completely) - thousands in repairs - and a few weeks after that I lost my job - laid off. I felt like a CW song....

Fortunately, I was given 6-mo severance, which sustained me up to retirement age... I've been a free agent since....

[saw]

My house was built in 1920....so that furnace was actually 95 years old.....essentially from a time when things were built to last close to a century.....there are refrigerators in Baltimore running in people's basements built in the 40's......but capitalism could not survive if we kept building necessities to last "forever ".......I bought a brand new kitchen range in 1995. by 2001 it stopped working. A young college kid working part time for this appliance company came out. Since he didn't plan to make appliance repair a career, he came clean. He said the electronics in this model is built to fail, and it's so expensive to replace, you may as as well buy a newer model that's more expensive and will probably last longer....WTF ?

[sasha]

that's one of my newer rants - the linguistic shift of "customer service" from "how might we better serve our customers" to "how can we get our customers more compliant with our wishes?" They've got us by the balls and they know it, and they gleefully shake us down without an ounce of shame. "Don't like it? Take your business next door. They're even worse." I've already groused about the bland uniformity of product offerings - no more "just right", only "it'll do" (viewtopic.php?f=98&t=34270#p221117) but marketing has taken over as the dominant force in consumer sales. "Buy - or not, we don't care."

(in regard to the linked rant - I ended up buying a camera bag that looked ok online, but turned out to be a flimsy, cardboard piece of shit. My sister was able to sew a new strap onto my old Tamrac, so I'm back in business, and all it cost me was pint of her favorite ice cream as payment.)

[sasha]

Gotcha...

I once worked in Quality Control for a manufacturer of single-use medical products - hypodermics, trach tubes, catheters, procedural kits, and the like. It wasn't so much by choice as by necessity - I'd been laid off from the engineering job I'd held for 22 years when the company disbanded its R&D department; and had spent the better part of another year burning up my severance trying to find a similar position that wouldn't require me to relocate. I ended up back on the bottom rung, with vague assurances that I'd been hired "to get me in there". But after 10 months with only a few indifferent nibbles, I was grateful just to have someplace to go every day. (It eventually palled, but that's a different story.)

You've seen those hypodermic needles with the orange plastic thingie dangling off the business end? That's a protective sheath that snaps into place around the needle after use, protecting against accidental jabs. We not only sold them, we invented them. (I say "we", though the patents were issued long before I started there.) We didn't manufacture them ourselves, but subcontracted that task to an injection molding house an hour or so away. It was one of our high-volume products, and therefore beloved of those whose livelihoods were directly tied to sales revenue.

So when these sheaths started flunking Incoming Inspection, management took notice, and directed one of the engineers to look into it. He, in turn, asked my supervisor for a "resource" to work with him. That became me.

Christian Schultz was a bulky, amiable fellow who took his responsibilities seriously. He was more than capable, but a worrier, and for every bright light on the horizon, he was apt to obsess over the shadows they cast. If he hadn't worn his vulnerability so openly on his sleeve, his hand-wringing might have become tiresome; but his gloomy predictions were never considered pissing and moaning; rather, more like a stammer or a favorite catch phrase, it was all "oh, that's just Chris." He was a good choice for the job - not only technically competent, but personable & likeable, traits useful for pressuring the supplier into meeting our specifications.

While I'd never worked closely with him before, we weren't strangers. I'd done the occasional ad hoc measurements for him, and we'd both taken part in the usual lab-bench bull sessions; so we knew each other well enough that the step from workplace acquaintances to collaborators was an easy one. I knew him well enough not to give his kvetching undue weight, and he knew me well enough to trust that all I needed was an idea of what to look for, without a detailed tutorial on how to find it. And we both had other duties to attend to, so we weren't married. I've been in unpleasant professional relationships; this was not one of them.

We spent weeks struggling with these tolerance issuess. They didn't yet adversely affect product performance, but if they continued they might, and needed to be addressed before we had to start issuing recalls. He spent a lot of time at their facility showing them our inspection reports and trying to convey the urgency of getting their molds back into compliance. He'd return late each day with sacksful of test parts whose critical dimensions I'd check the next day, and compare to those on the blueprints. It was tedious work, and I had to give him a lot of bad news. Weeks turned into months, but gradually, imperceptibly, the numbers began coming back within their spec limits, and when the statistics finally gave the thumbs up, we began to feel the problem was resolved. Looking over my latest data sheets, he sighed with cautious relief, and shook his head with a little smile. "Boy, will I be glad to put this project to bed!"

I couldn't have agreed more, but his open optimism seemed so out of character, I wanted to comment on it - and I couldn't resist a puckish impulse to sweeten the moment with a little vinegar. "Well," I said, "it could still be a while yet. I heard from Freddie (one of the supplier's mold operators) that their material supplier is using a dye that will become unavailable by the end of the quarter. They're already looking at alternatives."

Per FDA rules, such a change in raw materials would require any medical product using that polymer to be requalified. We'd be repeating what we'd just been through, but with full performance testing, for a dozen other products as well. The expression on his face went in rapid succession from relief to confusion, disbelief, horror, and despair; I briefly wondered if I'd gone too far. I let it go on for a three-count before taking mercy on him: "Chris - I'm busting your balls." The expression changed again, to chagrin, annoyance, back to wary hopefulness, at which point he started to laugh. "You bastard!" he said. "You bastard!" He leaned back and roared with unabashed relief, and gestured to the vision system we'd become so intimate with. "I outta chain you to that thing!"

He never completely shed his reserve with me, but he smiled at me more when we passed in the halls, and seemed a tad more relaxed in our future dealings.

[saw]

aah the old "break through"...or in dating we'd say the "old icebreaker"......I think we all at times throw up walls to protect ourselves, and if neither party cares to initiate entry through one the doorways , those walls remain erect, and the doors remain bolted tightly

[sasha]

so true - I hadn't actually thought of this as more than a snapshot of workplace dynamics, but that undercurrent is always there. It can run the other way, too - we've all probably extended a hand in friendship only to get it caught in the gears....

[sasha]

 
Eyes Right

5/6/2026 - Had my follow-up Ophthalmology visit with Jaeger today, the one I canceled last month because of the surprise snowstorm that left the roads slicker than I was comfortable with. This was to assess how effectively the 2nd laser surgery on my right eye was keeping the glaucoma tamped down. Results were very encouraging, but no warranty is stated or implied - it looked good after the 1st operation, too.

As long as you're here, he said, why don't we just give you the once over? So I said sure. I see my regular ophthalmologist next week, the more data we can give her now, the more informed her exam can be. So he dilated my pupils for the retinal scan - "Big Eye", I call it. He left to find a technician to run the scan, and with nothing to do but look around me, I looked around me.

The room gradually brightened as the drops took effect. My glances kept returning to the device attached to my chair by an articulated arm, a structure holding a carousel of lenses that could be rotated into position before an eyepiece - and for some reason, a pair of joysticks at its base. I had leaned over for a closer look at these, and was fiddling with them when an attractive young woman maybe in her 20s bustled in. I immediately (and somewhat guiltily) abandoned my exploration and sat back into the chair. "Did I startle you?" she laughed.

Funny how as you get older, all pretty young women remind you of your daughter. Must be nature's way of protecting us from making fools of ourselves. So I just leaned back into the seat and said a bit sheepishly "I was just checking out these joysticks." She seemed a bit at a loss, but otherwise not too put off by it. I felt maybe some further justification was called for. "Engineers never really retire," I added. "We just get old." She laughed graciously enough, and looked through the paperwork she'd brought with her to find out what to do with me.

She led me through a warren of corridors to a little unlit room where she photographed the inside of each of my eyeballs, and after leading me back, disappeared to deliver the results. Jaeger rejoined me a few minutes later with the news: little or no further degradation in either eye, from the glaucoma in the right, nor the macular degeneration in the left. Both a bit cloudy from cataracts, but not yet requiring removal. Keep up the daily eyedrops, see you next time.

An eye-squinting glare greeted me as I stepped outside and accompanied me across the parking lot. I hadn't brought a pair of the disposable tinted eyeglass inserts usually provided after the procedure, because dilation hadn't been on the original schedule. And then, assuming that the drizzly overcast would at least partly compensate for the medication's effect, I hadn't asked for a set at the desk on my way out. And the glare wasn't the only issue - the procedure also seems to blur my vision slightly, wrapping everything in a filmy haze. This was going to be an interesting drive home.

It wasn't until I climbed into the car and strapped in that I remembered there were a pair of insert shades somewhere in the center console, left over from a previous visit - so I rummaged about until I found them. They were dusty and smudged with thumbprints, but they'd have to do. I cleaned them best I could, and slipped them onto my glasses.

Better, but only marginally. Better than nothing, I supposed.

I'd planned on stopping at Market Basket to pick up a few items I'd forgotten on my weekly grocery run; but now concluded I didn't need them badly enough to negotiate the three traffic circles I'd have to cross to get there. I considered the other routes out of town, gauging the amount of traffic and other distractions I might encounter at each, and picked the one likeliest to minimize those variables. Let's do this, I thought, and started the engine. Once the on-board computer had booted up, the sound system came to life right where it had left off, in the middle of the sax solo in Snarky Puppy's "Broken Arrow". I shut the audio system off. I was going to need all input channels to get myself clear of the city and through highway construction on Route 12 before reaching the relative safety of the back roads.

A light, sporadic rain had begun to fall, the kind of rain that intermittent wiper settings are meant for. I let them run continuously. My vision didn't need the additional blurring from rain puddling on the windshield between wipes.

There's no need to describe each leg of the voyage in detail - I drove slowly enough to observe, process, and absorb the details around me, but not so slowly as to call undue attention to myself. The road construction wasn't the gauntlet I'd feared, just a matter of driving on the wrong side of the road between the traffic cones. There was a marked drop in traffic once I peeled off Rte 12 onto 119; and after turning from there onto East Lake Road, I felt Home, even with 5 miles to go. I know every inch of that road, intimately.

It's the kind of intimacy that goes beyond "Oh, I know where this road goes" - it's a deeper, more thorough intimacy that almost lets you negotiate it by feel alone. It's not just familiarity with the curves and bumps of each particular stretch, but knowing with your muscles what stretch follows whichever one you're on. You don't think about when to nudge the steering wheel, or ease up on the accelerator, or up- or downshift - you just DO it. You just know the feel of that curve up Webb Hill, where you can see far enough ahead to cross over the center line when you need a little momentum in icy conditions, because even if someone appears around the bend, you've got more than enough time to scootch back over onto your own side; or that curve by the lake, where you've got to be on the lookout for dog-walkers; or that funny little bump-bump at the join between the paving operations from 2018 and 2021. You just know what the road's going to say before it actually says it.

I met only one other car on this final leg before finally pulling into my driveway. I think it was Wayne, probably on his way to the dump. I couldn't see clearly enough be sure, but waved anyway. Don't know if he waved back. Either way, doesn't matter - I'd made it home in one piece, and had been assured my eyesight would be with me for a while longer yet. Once the eyedrops had worn off, anyway.
 

[saw]

When you arrive essentially in one piece into your seventies, there are a myriad of chores to take care of in maintaining that wholeness ( though wholeness would be a slight exaggeration ) We tend to grasp tightly to our independence. We need eyes that work ( among other things )...and to be truly independent we need to be able to drive ourselves to our appointments and return in that one piece, as I mentioned earlier. So I can definitely relate to your story, Roy.

On May 1st of this year a speeding driver creamed my daughter in law's car, then mine. I fear a 2012 Elantra will end up being a total loss given the damage she incurred . Sadly that would be a terrible injustice given there are only 83,00 miles on the odometer. Hell, Hyundai gives a 100,00 mile warranty...or 10 years which ever comes first. Obviuosly I hid the 10 years first.

The Perpetrator claims his wheel fell off, and he lost control of the car.....and sure enough 15 ft. in front of my car I could see a tire there. Upon examination there was also a wheel and a broken axle....the guy was driving so fast he ended up in the middle of the next block.....keep in mind...on 3 wheels !......the gouge in the asphalt well past my car suggests the impact of smashing into 2 vehicles is likely whay dislodged the wheel and the tire with it and also broke his axle....

Baltimore City now subs out all vehicle collisions to a company called OSS...we called the police, and this is what showed up...an OSS agent...right away I realize there is no authority here to perform a breathalyzer.....well that sucks....
So the driver ( and there is only one in this case, since my daughter in law and I were in the house ) will be giving documents to Agent Woodberry of the OSS....and doesn't need to talk to us....the bottom line is we do not know if the other driver was insured. We asked Agent Woodberry, and he said he gave me an insurance card that was expired...great !....sure wish there was a cop around.

Marisa has Geico and I have Allstate....and both 10 days after the crash will only say the accident is still under investigation.

So we wait.

I provided an email address to Allstate for OSS with the sequence number, the CAD number and the name of the investigator. Therefore an officially sanctioned by Baltimore city invesitgation has already taken place.

Still we wait.

Still we can't drive anywhere.

Oh, shit...I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow

Oh I'll just borrow Marisa's car


Oh wait !!

[sasha]

And in the meantime, you're supposed to sit quietly and wait until your name is called. Sorry this is happening - as if getting older weren't challenging enough already. Sucks when bureaucracy that's supposed to deal with situations like this makes things worse rather than better. It punishes everyone, not just those who deserve it. I hope this gets resolved satisfactorily, and soon.

I've only been in one auto accident in my life (so far). Sometime in 1975, I was on my way to work one morning when some kid pulled out of his driveway without bothering to scrape the frost off his passenger side window. He never saw me coming, & I didn't have time to stop. I managed not to T-bone him, but hit him a glancing blow. The police report convinced the insurance company that I wasn't at fault, but my car was damaged enough to justify replacement rather than repair. It was long enough ago that I've forgotten the details, but I don't have any lingering bad memories about it, so it must have gone smoothly at my end.

Also (appropos of nothing), your phrase "OSS agent" brought to mind quite a different picture from the one I presume you were painting. The CIA's predecessor was a WW2 intelligence/special ops force called the Office of Strategic Services - the OSS. I had a couple of books on their history, but I loaned them out & they never came back....

[saw]

In my case, OSS stands for "On Scene Services".....

their website kinda gives me the creeps.....haha

https://www.oss.city/about

[sasha]

Note Worthy

Listening to some Elliott Carter at the moment. I've had a pair of his string quartets in my LP collection for quite a while (hail Nonesuch Records!), and have enjoyed them on those occasions I've been in the mood for a quiet boat ride through dark, alien landscapes. At some point YouTube figured out that the outer fringes of my musical tastes includes such music, and has been offering me avant-garde selections like a waiter at a dim sum bar. I've been capturing some of these with Audacity, and stashing them away in my music folder like acorns.

This music isn't for everyone, as I unfortunately found out at our housewarming party back around 1980, when disco was still on life support. I'd foolishly included one of the quartets in a playlist I'd thrown together, the general reaction to which was a skeptical "What IS this shit?" (The playlist also included a few selections from the Mahavishnu Orchestra and several of Miles Davis's fusion explorations, so the effect may have been cumulative.) I won't say that Carter is an acquired taste - you'll either be intrigued on first listen, or swear that there shall never be a second - but if you're among the former, you'll find the emotional response to it visceral but hard to articulate. Primal. Searching, discovering... experiencing. I've heard it said that dreaming is nature's way of safely letting us go insane every night. Listening to Elliott Carter may be another.

His earliest music is quite conventional - pleasantly orchestral, if undistinguished. At some point (1950s? 60?) he took a hard left turn. Later works can be quietly introspective or frenetic, but all of it reminds somehow of how a wild animal might live out an ordinary day. Strangeness lurking everywhere behind the familiar. Sometimes the browsing is undramatic - sometimes conflicts arise. The world is neither dramatized nor idealized. It just Is.

So is this music. Not as accessible as Vaughan Williams, moreso (perhaps) than Iannis Xenakis. Music of a sphere not quite everyday, but not too far out of sight, either. I wouldn't play it at a party, nor if I just wanted something on while I'm reading - but when my subconscious is looking for a dance partner, it often fills the bill.

[sasha]

Zuihitsu: 4/10/2026 - Better Late Than Never

The shortest way to civilization from the dirt road I live on is another dirt road leading to paved state highways. During mud season, this shortcut is often impassable to all but military-class vehicles, and today I thought I could satisfy both my need to take advantage of a mild spring day and my curiosity about the shortcut's condition by an afternoon walk to the state line and back, a round trip of a little over 4 miles. As usual, I slung the camera around my neck and its kit bag over a shoulder. There are signs that I'm on the way to becoming a local fixture, a familiar roadside figure "down past Laurel Lake, you know, that old guy with the camera"... I wouldn't mind that at all. Fact is, I'd rather like it. I'd put that on my headstone.

Right out of my driveway, 1/3 mile steeply downhill, then right at the bottom. From here the road more or less follows Scott Brook, crossing it twice on its way south to the Millers River. I stopped at the second one to look at the water sliding past, thankful for warm sun on my face, for this long-overdue respite from an unusually cold and protracted winter. I leaned against the bridge railing and flicked from it a pebble that a snow plow had probably kicked up. It disappeared into the tannin-rich waters with a soft *plop*, the disturbance of its landing radiating outward in an ever-widening bulls-eye carried downstream, and distorted out of circularity by irregularities in the rate of flow. Parts of the wavefront were lost among the reeds lining the shore; the rest continued downstream as the circular arc gradually stretched out into a line. Then it was lost altogether, the pebble no longer even a memory, evidence of its passing erased by the passage of just a few moments.

So it is with us all, I suppose.

I crossed to the upstream side, which overlooks a narrow marsh crowded between two wooded hillocks, the water broad and smooth, dotted with specks of foam borne towards me. Such a familiar view, yet each time feels like the first - there's always something different, even if below the level of conscious perception - a dead branch has fallen, a deer has trampled the sedge on the western bank, a beaver has taken down a sapling. Such background changes might not register consciously, but they subtly alter the odor of the place all the same. The key in which the place hums is pitched ever-so slightly differently. It's familiar yet subliminally different each time.

I idly fingered the camera, wondering if I wanted to unsnap the lens cap & hoist the viewfinder to my eye; but I decided I already have more than enough shots from here filling up my hard drive. Besides, something on the railing near my elbow had just moved, & caught my eye.

It was an insect of some kind, first living one I'd seen this year in the wild. It was skinny, leggy, & wingy, barely a centimeter from face to bum. "Well hello there," I said, and poked it ever-so-gently with a fingernail to see what it would do. It chose to ignore my insolence, and only readjusted a few of its legs to regain whatever state of equilibrium it had assumed. I laughed, apologizing aloud, fully aware how inane conversing with a bug must sound, yet unable to ignore a teeny twinge of guilt over my puckishness being misread by its object. After all, I was just another denizen of these woods - who died and made me king?

Idly pondering the paradox, I returned my attention to the sun, the sky, the watercourse surrounded by marsh, the marsh surrounded by woods. A warm wave of gratitude washed over me, a serene happiness to be in this place, at this time, and for the glorious fact that this biological machine I've inhabited for 3/4 century still runs well enough to realize how fortunate it was to be alive on a day such as this.

Satisfied that the road thus far appeared passable, I turned & headed back uphill. It was a little rough right around the state line, where the two opposing border towns each hope the other will do the upkeep, but as long as I keep it in first, it should be fine.

[saw]

you are the Jim Bridger of this century......a pathfinder extraordinaire....with a gift for writing about your adventures

always enjoy your chapbook entries, despite my negligence in commenting at times.....I'm easily distracted and a bit lazy

but once I too was an explorer before the big C slowed my roll....but i can live vicariously here in the your pages of hikes

[sasha]

My Pal, PayPal

A few months ago, a small magazine in the UK began soliciting material for an upcoming issue to be dedicated to true stories of "haunted places" - places with a peculiar vibe about them. The editor had just used a ghost story of mine in his podcast, so I sent him a fresh draft of an incident I've posted here, and he seemed to like it. He suggested a few changes, which I made, and I didn't hear back until after it had gone to press, when he sent a bulk email to all of us who'd contributed. Besides laying out copyright issues, he asked each of us to let him know how we'd prefer getting the £50 we were to be paid. Before replying, I asked my bank about overseas transactions, and mailed him that information a few days later. But he hedged - gee, transaction fees, exchange rates, not sure I can do that - wouldn't it be easier to use PayPal? Since I didn't have a PayPal account, I'd need to create one, a process I was assured was painless and easy to do.

Ha.

Instead, it was like driving down a busy highway lined with billboards, traffic lights and interchanges, construction zones and high-speed police chases happening all around you... all screaming for your attention - "See Your Ford Dealer Now!" "Warning - Last Chance to Join Sam's Club!" "Arby's, Where No One Goes Away Hungry!" Shiny objects, marketing bait, visual noise all carefully engineered to confuse & buffalo rather than elucidate. Twirling icons, offers you can't refuse, glitter & pizzazz, ads for extensions I'd never heard of, but was assured I needed for the ULTIMATE payment experience... terminology incomprehensible to anyone over the age of 20... a pop-up asking me if I wanted a Passkey... What the hell is a Passkey? (Hadn't I already keyed in a Password?) Did I want Xoom? (What the what? Is that separate from Paypal? Just what the fuck am I signing up for?)

At least I recognized blank lines following a colon as fields that needed to be filled in, and dutifully supplied my name, my street address, my email address, my age, height, weight and blood type, my favorite vegetable, the first band I ever followed, and the last time I'd had my septic tank pumped. I keyed in the relevant information about my bank: Swift code, routing number, account number... to which it kept circling back with a bold-red-on-white tsk-tsk, until I realized there was more of the form hidden below the bottom edge of the screen it hadn't bothered to warn me about... I muddled through & completed the process, or at least thought I had, because it thanked me, stylized exclamation marks and all, and welcomed me to the fold. I felt a little drained when I signed off, like I'd run a marathon that had ended in some run-down industrial district instead of the park they'd shown in the glossies.

Later in the week I got an email from the editor confirming that the £50 deposit had apparently gone through, and when I logged on to my account, it showed a balance of some $60-odd bucks. All that remained now was to transfer it into the bank.

Ha.

I logged on, authorizing use of my "passkey", and navigated to the "dashboard", where I clicked on the little paper-airplane thingie below the word "BANK". (So much cuter, don't you think, than text stating "Click here for bank deposit"?) The next page of the display appeared, with a window declaring "Unable to complete transaction because something went wrong." Literally - no rhetorical exaggeration, now - "Something went wrong", quote unquote.

I was beginning to wonder how badly I really wanted this $60, & vented about it in an unrelated phone call to my sister. She urged me to give it another shot, since she uses it all the time - though to make, not receive, payments. I grudgingly conceded it was probably the grown-up thing to do.

So a few days later I tried again, and actually got further than my first attempt had. But for some reason, it kept asking me for information I'd already given it, and when I'd finished, and clicked "DONE", it cycled back to the top of the same list of questions. Disgusted, I logged off in mid-edit, and went for a walk, fuming to myself about molehills and mountains while fantasizing about grabbing marketing execs by their throats and suggesting where they could stick their product.

All was quiet after that until I received an email from their customer service. Seems they needed still more information about my account. I hadn't yet had my coffee, but I had just taken my blood pressure meds, and the day hadn't yet begun to chafe, so I followed the link to their site, actually hopeful of learning where I'd taken a wrong turn, & what to do about it.

They needed a photograph of me, they said. Also the name of my business, business contact, great-grandmother's maiden name, my high school GPA, and what I'd named my teddy bear when I was 4. They also enumerated functions they'd temporarily disabled, including not only fund transfer, but the ability to delete the account, or even to log off. I nearly lost it.

Actually, that's not true. I totally lost it. When they sent an A.I. 'bot to ask for details of my problem, I vengefully poured out all the bile & vitriol I'd had no audience for but myself while walking it off a few days earlier. I screamed at a goddamned chat bot. With all the maddening imperturbability of HAL 9000, it expressed how sorry it was I was angry, that it understood, and solicitously asked what it could do to help, with assurances that the happiness of their customers was of paramount importance to them. I was livid. "Just cancel my goddamned account", I wrote. "You can keep the money. Buy yourself something nice. Like half a bag of groceries." But it continued in the same condescending tone a child psychologist might assume with a disruptive 8-year old. It could see I was upset, it said, and wanted to know what it could do to make me happy. By now, I was beyond reason. The reptilian hindbrain had hijacked the vessel. "Die", I viciously typed. "You could die. That would make me very happy." And since I was unable to log off, I just closed the browser. I paced until my hands had stopped shaking.

Immature? Yeah, I suppose. My ravings must have read like one of those YouTube comments some angrily whining adolescent might post in reaction to a negative review of his favorite metal band. My after-the-fact rationale was that at it might at least draw the attention of a real live person somewhere within the electronic maze of the organization, whose handler would then urge them to do whatever it took to make this little gadfly from Cow Hampshire go away. And this gadfly would be all too happy to comply.

I know, I know... I know what you're going to say: "You must have done something wrong." Don't bother. Of course it was something I'd done, or hadn't done - that's on me. I'd made a mistake. My beef is that it was so easy to do. I've written enough software to know the good stuff from the bad, and this interface... isn't so good. It isn't clean. It's not straightforward. It's cluttered with distractions intended to encourage impulse buying, or worse, to trick you into signing up for features you may or may not need. The intent is to bury you under all the latest frills, bells, & whistles before you really know your way around. And while that infuriates me, what really, really infuriates me is that this has become the new normal because we've let it. We accept it because that's all we're offered, and it's all we're offered because we've accepted it. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, I had the same experience with Facebook. My daughter had an account and I wanted to keep in touch with her, and to be a good citizen of the Digital Age. But after wasting a morning fighting the interface's attempts to shoehorn me into a niche, I balked and walked away (though I think the account still lies dormant out there somewhere).

If this is the cost of being cyber-savvy, I'll pass. I wouldn't give you $60 for it.

[winddance]

can't fight city hall or ai chat bots. my attempt at paypal was a long loony road too. I ended up with the user name whadaheck, but wanted something slightly stronger.
ps if you buy something that takes paypal you can pay with the $60. (I think)