The five big tech companies have gotten so deep into our lives that at times it seems almost impossible to cut them out. If you overlook the bad stuff, they make life much easier. Facebook is is easy enough for the oldest seniors to figure out. Amazon will not only sell you the stuff you want, it will provide you with all kinds of entertainment — TV, music and books, both to read and listen to. Microsoft products are installed on most of the world's computer, even on Macs, many of which have a copy of office. Two companies, Apple and Google, managed to corner the cell phone market. They also handle your email, your files, your music, your viewing needs and more of your health information than you are probably aware of.

Meta

We started detangling after the election when I saw the billionaire owners of the tech companies beginning to bow and scrape to the new fascist regime. I closed all my Meta accounts (Facebook, Instagram, and Threads). I went so far as to block all connections to facebook.com on my computer. Wonder Woman still uses Facebook for her mother's sake, but that is about it.

Amazon

I also canceled our subscription to the Washington Post. Wonder Woman found new vendors for some of her recurring needs, running shoes and sports nutrition products. I rescued by Kindle and Audible purchases from Amazon and started researching alternative marketplaces. We are not going to renew our Amazon Prime subscription.

Microsoft

We do not own a computer that uses Windows. Most of my ties to the company were through the job I recently left. I installed a copy of Libre Office on my computer to deal with any documents that come from Microsoft Office. I have a personal free Microsoft account that I do not use and that I am going to close.

Google

At the risk of stressing out my wife, who is in the middle of a huge software implementation at work, I told her today that I wanted us to leave Gmail and Google Drive behind. I opened a Fastmail account using the discount from OMG.LOL, and I am starting the process of migrating twenty years worth of Gmail. I have to convert my Google Docs to another format and download all the photos and music I have stored on Google Drive too. I opened an account with Kagi and have already changed my search settings on all my devices. The process of de-Googling will take a while.

Apple

This is the company with which I will end up being most intertwined. They make the phone and the computer I use. I get too much joy from those devices to become a full-time Linux user or to adopt some off brand phone. I don't use them for email or bulk data storage and what I do use is under advanced data protection. I am working on moving to as many self-hosted services as I can manage for home use, including photographs and music.

I've adopted other privacy protecting tech practices as well, like using a VPN much of the time and using encrypted DNS 100% 0f the time to keep my Internet history private. We are already using several non-US companies for some of our needs and looking for end-to-end encryption on as many services as we can. I hope you see that the trend is moving towards people leaving thesse companies and their terrible practices. You can leave them too.

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I moved around as a kid, attending 13 schools, even though I went to the same high school for three years. As a result of all those moves, I was never able to keep up with any childhood friends from my younger years. There is one guy though, that's been a constant going all the way back to the 70's when we attended the same junior high. He and I went to the same Presbyterian church, so when I ran into him in the cafeteria in my first week at the new school, he was the only person I had any connection with.

He came from one of those families where everyone is above average. The youngest of five, his older brothers were a division one college football player at Duke, an ROTC scholar at Wake Forest and a West Pointer. His sister and Mom were teachers and his Dad was a retired Army officer and a successful businessman.

My buddy's name is James. We really bonded when he came to work at my family's farm. We spent long, long hours picking vegetables by the bushel, pulling acres of weeds once August came around, we mixed football practice in with the farm work. We also caught a break over that summer when we got to take driver's ed together. James was a natural athlete. I was more of a church softball guy but be never made me feel any less for it.

We went through high school together, sharing some classes. We also drank some beer, listened to many records and hung out. I was making alcohol influenced bad decisions even in those days, and he helped me recover from a couple of those. By the end of our senior year, I was estranged from my family and became a long-term house guest of his. His mother treated me with great tenderness. That she really and truly cared was very evident. She just had a gift for nurturing and a soft spot for me personally. She recently celebrated her 90th birthday. Wonder Woman and I went to the party, and she greeted me as warmly as ever, although I hadn't seen her in years.

After high school, James went to one of our state's flagship schools on a ROTC scholarship. He met and married a beautiful flight attendant at the chapel at Ft. Bragg. When the Gulf War happened, he was one of the guys sitting in the desert for months wondering if Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. Not too long after the war was over, he got out of the Army and used his business degree to land a few management jobs, eventually making his way back to North Carolina. Although he was raised in the church, it was more of a cultural thing than a serious conviction until he was introduced to the doctrines of the Seventh Day Adventists, a church he joined and became dedicated to.

He felt the call that some feel to become a minister, enrolling in the Adventist Seminary in Michigan. He also decided that the Army was where he was going to do his ministry as a chaplain. He's still in the Army today at the age of 60, a full bird colonel with a couple more years to go before he retires. James has lived all over the states and in Europe. He also spent several years deployed to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, ministering to soldiers who were fighting and dying in some of the worst parts of those wars.

He and his wife had a daughter and two sons. I knew his oldest two kids briefly before he went to seminary, but I've watched all three of them grow up through pictures. James and I always stayed in touch. I've always had his phone number and his email address. His mom's recent birthday party was the first time I'd laid eyes on him in quite a while. It was the first time he's met Wonder Woman. His job will bring him back to Ft. Bragg, near where I live, regularly for a while and we have plans to meet for breakfast at my beloved local diner when it does.

For over four decades, he's been there for me whenever I needed him. He talked me through the lowest spots in my recovery from addiction. He hasn't judged me for some of my questionable life choices. He's been a gentleman to everyone I've been married to, a number a little higher than the average guy. Hopefully, you have a friend like him. You're fortunate if you do. I know I am.

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As a kid growing up in a house where there wasn't much disposable cash, I learned early on that I had to figure out a way to hustle up some dough if I wanted spending money. In the 70s you could collect glass bottles and turn them in at the grocery store for cash. The going rate was a nickel apiece. My step-father was the editor of the local paper, The Harnett County News, and he let me sell newspapers on the street on the day the weekly edition was published. A couple of years later, aluminum cans replaced steel ones and a new opportunity for scavenging was born. I did that for a while, and then I finally had a job where I had pay taxes. I was 12.

Job # 1 - Newspaper Delivery

By the time I was in sixth grade, I was deemed old enough to have my own paper route. We'd moved to a new town, one where the newspaper, The New Bern Sun Journal, was printed six days a week. I split the six-mile route with my younger brother, who took the densely packed first mile. I pedaled the remaining miles on my bike, equipped with a front basket and two rear baskets, plus a bag slung around my shoulders. We hadn't had the route too long when my brother was struck by a careless driver and injured pretty severely. I took over his portion. On Saturdays, I had to go knock on doors to collect payment from my customers. Nothing was automated. I'm still mad at the people who tried to stiff a sixth grader for free newspaper delivery.

Job # 2 Farm Hand

By far the most difficult job I ever had was working on my uncle's farm from the time I was 14 until I was 18. I went to live with him after being asked not to come back to the junior high I attended in Jacksonville, NC just because I happened to have a little tiny bit of weed in my pocket one day. I may have tried to smoke it on the playground too. Anyway, my uncle had a small farm of just 60 acres. We cultivated the entire property with vegetables, known as truck farming in our area. The two of us, along with a tenant who lived on the farm and several high school students we hired, were responsible for all the labor. We sold all the produce directly to the public on the farm; none of it was taken to any market. Some were row crops we allowed our customers to pick at a discounted price, but the majority of the harvest was gathered by a farm employee. Picture 1,000 tomato plants raised waist-high, acres of butter beans, snap beans, field peas, English peas, Irish potatoes, pumpkins, squash, okra, cucumbers, peppers, watermelons, collard greens, turnip greens, mustard greens, and my least favorite crop of all: sweet corn, also known as roasting ears in the rural community. More farm tales

Job # 3 Landscaping

During holiday breaks from school , like Christmas and Easter, I would take advantage of the opportunity to earn extra money by working for a landscape company at commercial sites like banks, liquor stores and a large Monsanto factory on the outside of town. In the days before there was a large Latino presence, high school kids actually did work like this.

Job # 4 Bus Boy

My senior year in high school was tumultuous. By Thanksgiving, my girlfriend was pregnant. By the end of January, I left the farm after a big fight with my uncle. I lived briefly with my Dad who had just moved back to the state before finishing out high school, basically couch-surfing. My high school football coach called in a favor with a college buddy and helped me land a job working at Shoney's busing tables for minimum wage, money I was glad to have. I went there straight from school and usually worked until around 11PM. It was not a fun year.

Job # 5 Soldier

I started my time in the military by joining the National Guard when I was still in high school. For the last few months of my senior year, I spent one weekend out of four at the armory or in the field with the unit I would join after completing my training. They let me come in my civilian clothes and observe because they knew I needed the money, a little less than a hundred dollars was what I received each month. Eleven days after I graduated, I left my girlfriend, then seven months pregnant, for basic training. Our son was born about two weeks before I graduated.

Job # 6 Carpet Cleaner

After returning from training and immediately getting married, I moved a couple of counties away from where I'd gone to high school to take a job at a business owned by my aunt and uncle. It was one of the major mistakes of my life. The promise of a living wage they'd made me turned out to be 75 cents above minimum wage. I had no car, knew no one in town, had a wife and a baby and was doing a job that I had no experience in, cleaning carpets in the mansions of millionaires in the wealthy golf community of Pinehurst. It didn't last long. Thankfully, the head enlisted man of my National Guard unit offered me a way out of it one weekend as a bribe to keep me from murdering the sergeant in charge of my mortar crew. That's another story.

Job # 7 Carpenter

The last job I held before entering active duty was doing commercial construction for the civilian company my first sergeant ran as his civilian occupation. He helped me get the tools I needed and assigned me to work with experienced carpenters to learn how to do everything from preparing foundations, framing the floors walls and roof to hanging doors and installing baseboards and molding. I learned how to read blueprints and building plans and though briefly about making a permanent living doing that work, but the pay and benefits could not compete with what I could earn in the regular Army. I thanked the boss and enlisted in the regular Army. I was 19.

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To the best of my recollection, I got my first corporate email address in 1996. At the time, I worked for a subsidiary of the Westinghouse Electrical Corporation as a technical writer. I started there as a temp on second shift shortly after I left my job working for the state department of correction. After seven years of being a prison guard, I found myself in a noisy factory on my feet for a nightly eight-hour shift. Eventually, I was hired as a regular employee on days when my enthusiasm for all things technical drew the attention of a quality engineer, who got me what was supposed to be a two-week gig in the white-collar world to write some work instructions for the assembly line. I managed to leverage that into a full-time position and never went back to work on the factory floor.

The company gave me a powerful second generation Pentium computer, an expensive Kodak digital camera, a copy of Corel Draw and Corel Photo Paint and a color laser printer that cost more than the car I drove to work. They also gave me an email address. I developed a habit. When people asked me to do things via email, I'd respond to them and let them know whether I could accomplish what they wanted. It didn't matter to me if the email came from the manager of the facility or from a foreman in the machine shop. Email was no different to me than a phone call or a conversation. It was just a way to communicate about the job.

Little did I know that a particular type of person would evolve in the workplace. I found as years passed that it would become impossible to get some people to commit to doing anything in an email. You couldn't get them to answer questions, put forth ideas, or even acknowledge that you'd conveyed information to them. These people were all too often bosses. Someone put them in positions of authority to make choices and, by god, to be leaders. Unfortunately, they were so concerned with never being accountable for a damn thing, they'd rather have a conversation face to face in the middle of a hurricane than actually make a commitment in writing which you could later use to remind them of a promise they'd made.

And , you know what would happen if one of their verbally conveyed decisions or promises went sour? You know. You know that they would then lie and gaslight and deny ever having said such a thing. Furthermore, you obviously misunderstood them, or, maybe you are just making things up because you are a troublemaker. Yeah, that's it. You are not a team player. It's not like you have anything in writing, now do you?

I certainly hope that my scathing dislike for this kind of bullshit is coming across clearly. I wrote emails that conveyed, to the best of my ability to use the English language, exactly what i meant to say. I would make a commitment to you, in writing, to actually do my job, the one the taxpayers or the university paid me to do. My goal was to help my customers, fulfill my duties and earn my paycheck. I had no reason to make every decision based on covering my ass and self-preservation because people who feel like they have to live like that are a cancer in the workplace and I don't like them. At all. Not one bit.

Please be the kind of person who doesn't play silly games. Answer questions. If you are supposed to support someone, then support them. Don't be afraid to make commitments and, by all means, be honest. Everyone hates a liar.

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