I used to drive for hours a day. My office was 30 miles from my home, much of it over two-lane country roads teeming with school buses. The first year I had that job, I drove through Ft. Bragg but that came to a sudden and scary stop on September 11, 2001. During the day, I often traveled between schools spread out over the large rural county that employed me. I spent a lot of time listening to audiobooks and podcasts. I was once a big NPR fan, but they had a habit of playing clips of Mitch McConnell speaking and by 2008, I couldn't take his voice anymore. Finally, the Obama stimulus package from his first term kicked in and a good portion of my commute happened on multi-lane limited access roads.

I was a farm kid. I learned to drive in a 1976 Ford Ranger pickup on a hog farm in Johnston County, NC. By the time I took driver's education in high school, I could operate several kinds of tractors, including a vintage International Farmall and an even older Allis Chalmers. We had flatbed truck from the fifties named Spot and other vehicles in which we always left the keys. The actual acquisition of my state issued driver's license was delayed by my first run-in with the legal system. I got arrested for drunk driving when I was 15, BEFORE I had a license. That should have been a sign that I wasn't cut out for a relationship with Demon Rum.

In the Army I got to drive lots of things I only dreamed of as a kid. I've driven several different kinds of armored personnel carriers, an M1 tank, a Bradley fighting vehicle and the classic Army Jeep (we called the "Quarter Tons") that were replaced by HUMVEEs by the time my service ended.

The loneliest time of my life was when my first marriage split up. My ex moved from NC to PA with our two children. It was an almost 900-mile round trip that I drove on as many weekends as I could manage in a stick-shift Nissan Sentra with no radio and no AC. I couldn't afford to stop and eat along the way and I often made the drive on Friday night after working the whole day. Traveling on Interstate 95 still brings back those memories. After just a few years, the kids came to live with me and I didn't have to make that horrible lonely trip any more.

After that, the longest drive we made was when I'd take them to see their Nana, my mom, who lives at the coast. We made the trip in a variety of cheap cars over the years ranging from a $500 Chevette to Dodge Caravan I bought with a loan at 18% interest. My youngest was prone to car sickness and we would cheerfully point out to her all the spots where we had to stop for her to get sick over the years. Mom still lives in the same town today and I'm traveling the same roads to see, but Wonder Woman took over the driving a few years ago, so I have it easy now in the passenger where I might occasionally sneak a nap. Fortunately, I don't have to drive disposable cars any more either.

When I go visit my dad, who lives in the next county, I will sometimes accompany him when he takes my step-mother for her daily ride. She has severe memory issues and only gets pleasure from a few things anymore. One of them is riding slowly through the farm country and watching the cycle of the crops grown in our area: cotton, tobacco. corn, soybeans and grain. Occasionally someone will get a wild hair and plant sweet potatoes or peanuts or best of all, a huge field of sunflowers. She announces that it's time for her ride, by picking up her purse and standing in front of Dad, who always just gets his keys and heads with her towards their car. If I'm there, I climb in the back seat and go along.

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Me, my sister and my brother

Last week my sister sent messaged me about a failed drive from which she needed some files recovered. She is pretty savvy with computers. She's pretty savvy with most things. Not only that, but she has never used me for free tech support, so I knew this had to be important. She explained that twenty years worth of files from her career as a Methodist pastor were on the drive, her "whole life" as she put it. I told her she could send me the drive, and I'd see what I could do. I didn't lecture her about backups or anything like that.

Over the years, I've been approached by more than one crying person holding a USB drive or a laptop. I've seen people lose the only copy of their not yet submitted master's thesis, the only copy of their wedding video and twenty years worth of lesson plans by one unfortunate middle school teacher. Sometimes I've been able to rescue files but more frequently, despite my best efforts, I haven't been able to help people who have asked, despite badly wanting to.

My sister's drive arrived by mail tonight. It was a 2TB Western Digital external hard drive with a USB3 connector. I added an adaptor and plugged it into my laptop, and it mounted immediately, a good sign. It was formatted with an NTFS (Windows) file system. Unfortunately, instead of showing me the file system, I just got a message that said, "Drive Not Available." That was not a good sign.

The data recovery application I own is called Disk Drill. I'm a Mac user, but the company that makes it also has a Windows version. Disk Drill scanned the drive, and it was able to see files on it. It wanted me to make a byte for byte copy, but I didn't have another 2TB drive on hand. I had two 1TB hard drives and a dual drive bay, though. I used the Mac disk utility to combine the two physical drives into one logical drive and tried to initiate the copy again, but still got a message that the drive was too small. Since I knew that there was less than 100 GB of actual data on the drive, I was able to adjust the size of the number of bytes to be copied and the backup started. Although data seemed to be moving quickly, the progress indicator said the backup would take 28 hours. Ain't nobody got time for that.

Rather than doing a byte for byte copy, which also includes empty space, I elected to Disk Drill's recovery option instead. I initiated it and began to copy files, sometimes quickly and at other times seeming to stop. I got messages about the disk having physical damage, but the program never quit. After about 90 minutes, I had 86K files recovered.

I called my sister and asked her to identify the most critical files and folders so that we could see if they were among the rescued files. They were. She lives just over 100 miles from me, so we agreed that I would begin to upload the data to my Google Drive and that I'd send her a link when it was done. As gently as humanly possible, I suggested that she start keeping two copies of her files. She explained to me that the situation was complicated.

In the process of being assigned a new church, she discovered that her laptop, which is indeed hers and not the property of her employer, had been set up by the tech folks at the church she was leaving to use their One Drive. She had not been aware of that and didn't discover it until she went to look for her personal files and discovered they weren't available through the user profile she now had access to. She got temporary access to the old account and copied her files onto her external drive and then deleted them. And then, of course, the drive failed.

That's where I entered the story, a story that looks like it is going to have a happy ending. My sister has done a lot for me and my kids over the years. Being able to do this for her is just me repaying some of the karmic debt I've incurred. Always celebrate your victories, like I'm celebrating this one.

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Here at the tail end of a career where I've spent at least some portion of my time providing technical support to the end users of technology in industry, education, medicine, insurance and banking, there isn't much I haven't seen. That includes devious middle school kids getting around security protocols designed by the brightest minds at Apple. It also includes people with multiple advanced degrees who can't read instructions on a screen that tell them to click a button labeled "Next."

I was around when Internet connectivity was introduced to the workplace. I worked with truly lovely and talented teachers at the tale end of long careers who valiantly tried to switch from paper grade books to buggy DOS-based student information systems. They would apologize when asking for help and just about always use the phrase "I am not a computer person." I'd say "That's OK, I don't know how to teach kindergarten." Some learned faster than others. Some, sadly, never learned and retired.

OK, that was a quarter of a century ago. I don't have that attitude any more. According to Consumer Affairs, 91% of adults in the US have a smart phone - which is a hand held computer with an operating system. Computer skills are taught in public schools. Most universities require students to have a laptop. Desktops and laptops have been ubiquitous in business for many years. And yet, and yet - I still get hit with "I'm not a computer person."

Somehow, the decision makers in many workplaces have decided that demonstrating competency with one of the basic tools of a job isn't a requirement. They hire people like me to hold the hands of their employees, enabling them to forego skill development because they can just call IT when they can't find a file they were working on yesterday or they've forgotten their password for the third time this month or they can't figure out how to make PDFs open in Adobe Reader.

We require our employees to figure out how to get to work. When automotive technology changes, we don't hold their hand to show them how to plug in an EV. People buy Smart TVs every day, and they figure out how to watch Monday Night Football. Most of my fellow grandparent types manage to get Candy Crush installed.

It absolutely blows my mind how many people using Windows don't know how to find apps by clicking on the start button. I've spent over 30 years being told by IT managers to put the icons for MS Office and the installed browsers on every user's desktop. I don't expect people to use a hex editor or anything, but come on, why do we work from an expectation that people are stupid? Why isn't learning to use a password manager a basic skill? There's a sizable population who truly refuses to use self-service password resets. If they can't call the help desk to get their password reset, they just sit there, not working. WTF?

I've probably written a version of this post four or five times before. I'll finally retire soon enough and then I won't worry about it anymore. It will be someone else's turn.

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I'm not one you worries about endings that much. In my experience, they are difficult to predict and arrive suddenly. Jobs, marriages, friendships, passions are all here until they are not. Buddhists believe that everything is disintegrating from the moment it is created. So do I. Permanence is an illusion. Thinking back on the giants I've known and how I could not conceive of a world without them and now what do I have? I have a world without them.

I am not implying that my wife or your is going to leave either of us tomorrow, although you never know what's going to happen tomorrow. Because all rules have exceptions, there are cases where things apparently haven't changed over the course of my lifetime. No matter what I've done, and I have certainly done much, my dear Mom has always been there. Always. Always. Always.

Within one month's time, I went from a child walking in a line to the lunchroom, raising my hand when I wanted to speak and asking permission to use the bathroom to being handed a rifle and shooting at human silhouettes representing the enemies of my country. Childhood ended abruptly at the gates of Ft. Benning. More than once, I had a job when I woke up and didn't have one when I went to sleep. It could happen again tomorrow.

Any reunion worth its salt will have a table with pictures of those who could not be there to celebrate. Because they died. In fact they start dying immediately, and they just keep on doing it. The rest of us keep getting up and going to work until we join them and someone puts our picture in the table at the next reunion.

I have a point.

I'm getting to it.

Just live. Do your job and try not to love it or hate it too much. It's just a job. Love your wife today. Don't wait for things to get better or different before you're ready to put in that extra effort. Friendships can wither if you don't water them, so fill up your bucket and make some phone calls or get in your car and go see someone. If you have a passion, and god I hope you do because that's what makes life worth living, then act on it today. Ride your bike, write in your journal, get out your camera, go to the gym. Do it today. It's all you have.

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Despite having tried mightily for many years, I've never experienced a moment of true belief in God in all my time on planet Earth. I grew up attending church. I took my kids to church. I've been baptized in three different denominations. I owe my life to a program that is riddled through and through with references to God (there are loopholes) and yet I just can't muster up any conviction that there's anything like a deity. I just can't do it.

I'm not angry with religion. I don't think religious people are stupid or always deluded. I think there's a lot of wisdom and practical life advice in many tenets of various faiths, including Christianity, the one with which I am most familiar. If you don't believe the golden rule has practical applications in personal relationships, we probably won't be friends. Unlike a lot of in your face Christians though, I am much more comfortable with the Beatitudes than I am with the 10 Commandments. "Blessed are the peacemakers. Blessed are the merciful" I can get behind that.

My sister is a minister in the Methodist Church. Aside from religion, we share a lot of similar beliefs about the world and about the solutions for its problems. I get angry when someone makes it known how much they love Jesus and yet they vote for a party or politicians who promise to cut food programs for the poor, as an example. My sister explained how some people truly believe that the answer to poverty is the food kitchen at their church, where they donate their time and money, taking a personal interest in the people who show up there. OK. I think that kind of labor and commitment is admirable. I don't think it's a comprehensive answer to poverty, but I don't look down on it.

When there are natural disasters, and I live in hurricane country where they are common, there are organized teams from faith based organizations who show up with boots on the ground to help people. The provide food and other necessities to anyone who needs it. Habitat for Humanity has a great record of helping people achieve home ownership. Mission teams routinely go to Haiti and other impoverished counties in this hemisphere to provide medical care and construction labor. That's real tangible stuff.

Yes, there are massive problems and contradictions with religion worldwide and particularly in my country. Covering up the sexual abuse of children by priests for decades is inexcusable. The church's attitude toward the LGBT community is a direct contradiction to the premise that God is love. The right-wing claim to be the party of God is offensive to anyone, even non-believers, who have ever read the Bible. The persecution of immigrants, the denial of food, shelter and medical care to people in need in a country with so much excess wealth is obscene. I'm not making any excuses for that.

Except for the believing in God part, most of my personal ethical and moral standards would past muster with the church. When I see someone who is comforted by their faith, I am nothing but happy for them. It's a damn cruel world and all of us has to take comfort wherever we can find it.

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