If one of my friends came to me upset because they had been treated disrespectfully by someone at work, I'd ask them not to let themselves be defined by some random rude person. The world is full of assholes and unfortunately, we all encounter them from time to time. I'd let my friend talk it out and vent because that can help people begin to deescalate a bit. I'd help them come up with the best way to handle the situation. Was the asshole a peer, a supervisor, or a customer? Most of the time, the best advice will be to just go on living your life, doing your job and not to give the offender the satisfaction of knowing that they got to you. I would feel some compassion and gladly help them work through it because that's what friends are for.

I don't do so well when I have to give myself the same treatment. For the second time this year, I got absolutely blindsided by someone at work today. I was setting up a workstation for a chemistry professor when the admin for his department came in and announced "Make sure you check everything before he leaves because when they set up my stuff, nothing worked for two weeks." I looked at her dumbfounded.WTF? I set her up when she was hired and never got a single ticket from her afterwords. I've deployed workstations to hundreds of people on the campus and have never gotten that kind of feedback. I was embarrassed and knew better than to engage in front of the professor. I later emailed the admin and found out that part of her original issue was with her telephone, which isn't something IT handles. She doubled down on the rest of her story, though, claiming I'd left her with a laptop that couldn't access the network or print. That would be pretty difficult because part of deploying a computer is printing a page from a network printer that the user has to sign. 

Wonder Woman, who actually has an important, high-powered job at the same university, unlike my low-pressure, just doing it to pass the time job, did her best to talk me off the ledge. She swears that I am a well-loved and valued person who has a reputation for being super-helpful and nice. That's absolutely what I strive to do. I swear I'm not one of those mean IT guys that fusses at people. Nor am I a slacker. I'd never want to embarrass my wife or myself like that. I genuinely like helping people out with computer issues. I've been doing this for 30 years. During my career in public K-12 education, people were more professional and respectful than what I have encountered in higher ed.

I wrote an angry email that I didn't send. As the hours pass, I am less and less upset, but I am still bothered. I know I am not responsible for this person's lack of social skills. I don't question my ability to do something as simple as issue a workstation to a new employee. I don't know what it will take for me to feel whole after this. I plan to talk to my boss tomorrow to ask him to have a word with this lady's boss. I fear that my boss, who is very much a "don't make waves" type, will opt for ignoring it, and I don't know how to handle that. I'm not working these days for the dough as much as I am to have something to get me out of the house and keep me busy. If it starts feeling like a net negative, I can just head right back into retirement.

Anyway, thanks for listening/reading as I work this out in my own head.

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I updated my /now page - What I’m reading (The Hot Zone) and watching (Silo), plus links to this week’s blog posts, the week’s best purchase, (Phone case) and the links I added to my personal bookmarks.

I just returned from the grocery store. On the way home, I thought how different the experience is now compared to what it was like going with my mother back in the 70s. Back then, we had dramatically fewer choices than we have today. There were two kinds of apples back in the day, red apples and yellow apples. Today, there are a dozen or more to choose from. I like watermelon. Check that. I love watermelon. I could eat it every day. Thanks to the miracle of refrigerated shipping containers. In 2024, I can eat it every day. I no longer have to wait for the middle of summer to get here before I can enjoy my favorite treat.

Did you ever make a special trip to someone's house because they owned a record that you didn't have, and you just wanted to listen to a song from it? Kids these days don't have that experience. They can listen to practically any song ever recorded whenever they want to through the miracle of Spotify and Apple Music. If your budget has room for it, you can go from hearing about a book for the first time to reading it in the span of a couple of minutes, thanks to the availability of downloads from the major publishers. The same goes for movies and TV shows. We don't even mention instant gratification anymore because all gratification comes immediately, it seems.

My grandmother lived most of her life in a square mile patch in a rural community in southeastern North Carolina. She never left the country, and she rarely left the state. I have grandchildren still in school who have visited Europe more times than I have. My son, who is single and has a good job, often travels to cities across the country on the weekends just to take in art museums and experience new cities.  I remember going on a field trip in the sixth grade from the small town I lived in to the state fair in Raleigh. One of my classmates was terrified as the bus crossed the bridge over the Cape Fear River. That bridge was only two miles from her home, and she had never been across it before. In so many ways, the world is much smaller today than it was in the past.

Brilliant people have designed systems to make my personal information available wherever I go. From my work computer to my phone to my laptop at home, I can work on the same document and look at the same pictures with little to no effort. 

I can clearly remember the first time I retrieved a local weather report from a computer. When I was growing up, you could listen to the radio at a certain time of day or, better yet, wait for the six o'clock news to get a weather report. The idea that I could get one whenever I wanted to just by typing on a keyboard was miraculous, and it impressed me to no end. Even though the modern internet seems designed more to take money out of my wallet than for any other purpose, it still serves as an endless source of fascinating information available whenever I want it. Brilliant people have designed systems to make my personal information available wherever I go. From my work computer to my phone to my laptop at home, I can work on the same document and look at the same pictures with little to no effort.

Like most people, I take all of this for granted and seldom take the time to consider what a true miracle it is and how rapidly it has all evolved. I even get irritated when my mind can conceive of an idea that no one has invented yet. Actually, that rarely happens. People seem to come up with ideas and make them realities faster than I can master the skills to take advantage of them.

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I've worked in education since the 90s. December is one of my favorite months, particularly now that I am in higher ed. Our final exams were last week and the students are gone until the middle of January. The only ones left on campus are our contingent of international students on Davis scholarships, most of whom cannot afford to fly back to their country of origin for the holidays. In the IT department, the first part of the month is reserved for projects we can't do while school is in session. This year we are replacing wireless access points in a couple of buildings, which involves much climbing of ladders and talking on radios to make sure the new devices come online.

On the personal side, even though we are not religious, Wonder Woman and I still have a tree and decorations inside the house. My only contribution to that happening is carrying the boxes of supplies from under the house into the living room and then getting out of the way. She gets everything put up efficiently and quickly because that's the way she moves through life. She gets things accomplished while I am still deciding how to get started. Today I worked on a couple of my own projects while she did her thing while Christmas music filled our living room.

We, and by we, once again I mean she, buys all the Christmas gifts online. We are not the type of people to go bargain hunting in crowded stores with crowded parking lots. For a couple of weeks at the beginning of the month, we come home to what we call "papages," a word coined by our grandson for the boxes the man in the brown truck leaves on your porch. Then, in one marathon session, she wraps them all and puts them under the tree. My part is staying out of the way.

I enjoy some special foods during the season. I am partial to Clementines, the small, easy to peel tangerines and lots of salty country ham and southern style biscuits. Although I love the taste of eggnog, I avoid it because it reminds me too much of my drinking days, when I used to have it with bourbon at Christmas. My sobriety date is December 28, so the last days of my drinking career sadly happened during Christmas of 2008.

Our travel during the holidays is pre-determined and has changed little over the course of our marriage. On Christmas Eve, we gather at my in-laws, who live near the coast. They are of Italian heritage, so the big meal is lasagna. After we eat and exchange gifts that evening, Wonder Woman and I will drive another couple of hours up the coast to my mother's. She is a widow and without us would be alone. We will spend the night with her and visit some in the morning before making the drive across the state to my daughter's house.

We often take a getaway trip during the holidays, usually to the mountains. This fall, our favorite mountain towns were all extensively damaged by the flooding resulting from Hurricane Helene. The town of Asheville just started pumping potable water two weeks ago. As a result, this year we are traveling down to Savannah, Georgia to enjoy its delights. We thought about taking the train, but our recent Amtrak experiences have not been positive, so we are going to drive.
Whatever your December plans happen to be, I hope you get some time off and an opportunity to relax and to see your family if that brings you joy.

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