Just a beer. And a plate of pasta: comfort drink, comfort food.
Finally finished shoveling away the layers and layers of paper that have floated in the door and come to rest atop my desk. Interestingly, the desktop seems to be made of wood…huh! I’d forgotten that.
So gawdawful much paper comes flying in the door or gets dragged into the house in a purse or stuck on the bottoms of my shoes…God only knows how it all it all makes it way in here. I tend to drop it where it arrives: on the dining room table, on a kitchen counter, on the passenger seat of the car, on my desk…on my desk…on my desk….
It took the entire morning to dig the desk out from its current burden of paper, some of it dating back to 2018. About 90% of it is stuff that either needs to be kept or needs to be shredded, so less than a trash-basketful goes to the recycling. {sigh}. Well, except for the stuff you run through the shredder…that, actually, can be composted, if you’re careful to avoid grinding up any of the plastic “envelope windows” that come with some mail.
At any rate, after several hours of sorting, file-folder stuffing, and shredding, boyoboy does that desk look CLEAN. Who’d’ve thunk it was possible?
That notwithstanding, the overall hassle never, ever stops.
This morning the DropBox hassle developed a new twist and turn. I called to tell them I don’t want them to renew my annual subscription for extra space and was horrified to discover that despite my having spent two and a half days transferring 87 berjillion kilobytes to iCloud and deleting said kilobytes from DropBox, the damn stuff is still on DropBox!
That’s right. They keep it as a “back-up” stashed away where you can’t get at it to kill it off.
Augh!
Getting rid of it takes an elaborate techno-hoop jump, following instructions that might as well be in Martian. I tried to reach a techie friend to see if I could hire him (please!) to help, but he’s not answering.
So…what alternative?
American Express, I guess. This is why I persist in using AMEX: like Costco, like Apple, they have superlative customer service. I call and reach a patient CSR. Explain the situation: DropBox is not about to let me off the hook, and I do not want to pay for the extra server space to accommodate data that they will not simply reach out and delete or explain to me in simple terms how to erase.
N-o-o-o-o-o problem, quoth the AMEX dude. He put a block on the next bill from DropBox.
DropBox charges $9.99 per month(!) for a terabyte of storage. Apple is now charging the same, for the same amount of storage — having dropped its price by 10 bucks a month. However, I do not need a terabyte of cloud space: for $2.99 I can get 200 gigabytes. Well, even unedited and un-shoveled out, my DropBox files add up to a mere(!) 160GB. A-n-n-d there’s a LOT of stuff in there that could go away. When I get around to it, I’ll move a pile of superannuated debris off of iCloud, which will free up enough space to last for all of posterity.
Weather is starting to warm up a bit. If I felt like jumping into slightly chilly water, I could plunge into the newly resurfaced pool. But I’m too lazy to get cold just now: bad human.
The watering system is on the fritz. I need to call an irrigation guy to fix it, since all Gerardo seems to do is shut off the valves for the parts that spring a leak, leaving my plants to die. He doesn’t seem to understand — or to care — that a potted plant will die in one day flat if it’s not watered daily once the temps are over about 90 or 95 degrees. So that’s yet another hassle to deal with.
And I do need to find a tree guy to remove the devil-pod tree on the west side, which has become a bit menacing. The US weather service expects this winter’s El Niño to linger over the Pacific through the summer. What meant nice rains in the winter, then, will mean heavy winds and violent monsoons this summer, hiking the risk of that tree breaking and falling on my neighbor’s house or mine. Again, Gerardo said he’d do it…but…no action there. Dayum….just what I need to kill some more time on.
The winter’s rain, though, produced some very gorgeous flowers this spring…
Unfortunately these look awful. Somehow the new iCloud thing has f**cked up my photo function. Dammit! Am I ever SICK of this computer bullshit! It just simply never stops!
Slowly, SLOWLY, SLOWLEEEEEE some aspects of the present Chaos Storm are resolving.
DropBox: After three days of downloading, it’s all copied over into iCloud. Now, after one last backup (which presumably will take another 36 hours, if it can hold together that long), I will be able to delete all the DB files except for those dedicated to a couple of clients who freakin’ insist on using it. When they’re gone, DB is gone, done, GONE.
iCloud: Seems to have finally absorbed all the Drop-Box data, after three long days of grinding away. Tried to back up to DropBox Time Machine, preparatory to deleting DropBox Files, and discovered Time Machine wants to copy down BOTH DrobBox and iCloud: all the redundant contents thereof. Jayzus! This will take till the middle of the next century!
PayPal: In the wee hours of the morning — along about 2 a.m. — I woke up and thought…hmmm…I wonder. So, stupidly wondering, I opened the new online credit union account and found a) one savings account containin g $5.59 and b)…nothing.
That’s right: NOTHING. Nooooo sign of a checking account. Four grand has disappeared into the ether. I have vendors to pay, and far’s I can tell, I have no money to pay them.
That was at 2:00 this morning.
Needless to say, I have not gone back to sleep since then. Presumably I will not go back to sleep before 9:00 Monday morning, when I intend to be standing outside the crecdit union’s doors waiting for the staff to show up.
Mentioned this in passing to a friend who’s a legal assistant for a ferocious criminal litigator. She said “eeeek! Call the police.”
Well. Not so much. I do not know whether this reflects hacking into PayPal (no money left = no new checking account) or whether my system is just not accessing the new account. In the immortal words of Zaphod Beeblebrox: DON’T PANIC.
Easier said, o’course, than done.
Pool fiasco: As of this morning, it was about 50% improved, having had two gallons of chlorine applied to its hazy depths. Off to Leslie’s, where for a change the boss was holding forth. He was highly amused by the tale of…whateveritis…and thought Pool Dude’s advice was good as far as it went, which wasn’t far enough. Chlorine, despite adding two gallons(!!!!!) of liquid chlorine, was back down to zilch.
He thought another shock treatment and then keeping the Cl level fairly high for awhile would do the trick. Needing some more of my favorite granulated Cl product, I decided to spring for 25 pounds, which despite the bracing price is far less per pound than what I pay for smaller packages of it.
Computer: ay-freaking-AMAZING! Running perfectly. Effectively Apple rebuilt the MacBook and sent me a brand-new computer. WHY does anyone buy anything other than Apple products?
My (few!) surviving clients: Returned a revised Table of Contents and four edited chapters to one client; two chapters and some writing coaching to the other. Think of that: I’ll never have to figure out what a Chinese professor of higher mathematics is trying to say…ever again. {sigh}
State of mind and body, after starting at two o’clock this morning? Exhausted. Going back to bed, 9:04 p.m.
Funny has been incommunicado for the past week because…well…I feel like I’m swimming uphill against a river of chaos at flood stage! Just about everything that can go wrong has gone wrong: The computer, PayPal, DropBox, the pool, surgical wound infected or possibly gone wrong in some more bizarre way…about the only fiascos that haven’t happened are a leaking roof, a crashed or busted car, and a kaput hot water heater. And that last is threatening to occur.
And of course, all this happens when, despite having lost 80% of my customer base, a freaking FLOOD of work is pouring in the front door. And it’s Eastertide, so the choir is occupying some portion of almost every hectic day.
Okay…
PayPal: They have no customer service. Well, worse than that: the one person I got ahold of was just rude. After a series of fiascos, beginning with their policy of not allowing me to transfer my clients’ payments to my bank account, costing me not only payment for that job but also payment for a job for a different Chinese scientist, I want to close the damn account. But I can’t get in: my current password won’t work. Neither will any of my other passwords. And because you can’t reach a person there without entering a password…well…of course you can’t close the account.
The Copyeditor’s Desk’s bank account is attached to that PayPal account. This means anyone who hacks in can transfer cash out of my bank account.
The only way I can think of to forestall that is to change the number on my bank account. That apparently doesn’t involve closing the account and opening a new one — at least not according to a phone rep I reached at the credit union. But it does mean I have to traipse across the city to speak to the manager in person. That will be a major hassle.
Yesterday I was too busy coping with the swimming pool fiasco and the iCloud hassle to make this happen.
iCloud < Dropbox
So, yes. I’ve had a series of problems with DropBox, too, again not resolvable because that august service also has next to no customer service. ENOUGH with that, already! The path of most resistance there: open an iCloud account and move all my stored data from DropBox to iCloud.
Well. This entails transferring tens of thousands of files. Almost 48 gigabytes of data.
Lovely.
*****
Many, many hours later…
The data transfer project is still under way. I spent all day yesterday on that project. Today iCloud hung when it tried to transfer some Big Gulp of data, and has not unhung. It stayed hung for hours, until just a couple of minutes ago, and since the dog just bit me and damn near crippled one of my typing paws, it’s unlikely to get fixed today. Or, I’ll betcha, tomorrow.
Moving on to the pool: Pool Dude came and cleaned the cartridge filter, a fairly simple and short job for which they charged me a staggering fee. He remarked, when he came in, on how sparkling clean the pool was, how crystal-clear the water. Within an hour after he left, the thing looked like someone had dumped in a box of Starlac Instant Milk.
Ugh! What a mess.
Water sample to Leslie’s: low in chlorine, high in chloramines. Dump in some FreshNClear (a non-chlorinated shock treatment) and prepare to use Phosphase…which will clog up the filter, requiring it to be cleaned again ASAP, to the tune of ANOTHER $150.
Call Pool Dude’s employers. They send him right over. He says not to use the FreshNClear. I say I’ve already put it in. He snorts. “Pour in two gallons of liquid chlorine.”
Sure enough. Everyone has gallons of liquid chlorine laying around the house, right?
When I get a chance, come the next morning, I schlep up to the Depot and buy two gallons of liquid chlorine.
Its instructions say to use ONE gallon, not two. Taking a chance, I apply only one bottleful of it.
Result: Starlac.
This morning I dumped in the second gallon. Cloudiness is just marginally better.
Pool Dude has said the pool will clear on its own. I don’t believe this for 30 seconds. However, my hands are fuller than full, so I decide to take a chance that no harm will be done if I wait until Monday to do battle with this fiasco.
What a fuckin’ mess.
This, you understand, is probably going to require me to drain and refill the pool And that will cost me about $200. On top of the $150 I just paid Pool Dude’s employer. Yeah.
I do not know what happened here, but I do know that contrary to Pool Dude’s assertion, there was no algae in there and that gray mist is NOT caused by an algae overgrowth. (Give. Me. A. Fuckin. BREAK!!!!!! How dumb DO they think the Little Woman is?)
Infected dermatological surgery wound: No improvement. Got an appointment next Tuesday. This is not a good thing, because I’m beginning to think, since there is exactly zero change in this thing no matter how I try to treat it, that this is actually not an infection but possibly a tumor that flared up into something one helluvalot more ominous than it was when they sprayed it with liquid nitrogen. It is black. Can you spell “melanoma,” Little Woman? I’m damn scared and would like not to have to wait until next week to have a medical professional see the fucker.
Clients: Rattling around the peripheral fences, three chapters to one of ’em, four to the other. They’re anxious about the demise of DropBox. Assure them not to panic. Scent of panic is on the air.
Rose window of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Further Distraction: Lost track of the fact that we had to sing for the Stations of the Cross this noon. Flew in the door, unrobed, and shot up the stairs as the rest of them had taken their places in the loft. Gasping for breath, just barely caught up. Very, very lovely music.
Stumble away from church. Stop by AJs and buy something for lunch/dinner.
But then realize that will never do: I need to go to the credit union and put them up to changing the account number on my corporate checking account. This is now attached to the new PayPal account to which PayPal will not allow me access. NONE of the passwords, including the most recent, work to get me into PayPal. And…you can’t reach customer service in unless you’re signed in with a password. Yeah.
Well, I want that account UNattached, before some hacker gets in there (if they haven’t already) and drains my damn bank account.
So, before presuming to eat a meal, I get back in the car, half-starved, and traipse westward westward, ever westward to the credit union. There I find my favorite and smartest Bank Dude. His cube is festooned with balloons, one of them saying “We’ll miss you.” Helle’s belles.
“What’s this? Are you leaving?”
“Yeah, Today’s my last day. I’m being moved to corporate.”
Well. No one of my acquaintance deserves a promotion and a raise more than this gent. But still…I’m not happy to see our wonderful man go. Oh well. Luckily I forced myself to go out there today…for a brief shining moment I imagined I could skip the junket until next Monday and have…oh, you know, the first and only full meal of the day, along about 2:00 p.m.
It was a moment of serendipity that I took it into my head to drive out there today, even though I really truly absolutely positively did NOT want to.
In his classic cool and polished manner, he morphed the business’s checking account into a new bidness checking account with a new number, and fuckuyouverymuch PayPal. He even ordered up a new box of checks for me.
So. This is good. Really, I need do nothing more, because now exactly zero harm can come from a PayPal account that can do me exactly zero good.
Manage to shake loose the iCloud transfer software with a couple of DIY tricks. One of them — or possibly both in combination — interrupted the hung process. Delete the superannuated and probably unnecessary data; restart iCloud and set it to transferring the remaining folders-on-foldersful of data. It proceeds without (finally! after two days of this!) hitch.
Thank god the chow acquired at AJs is cooked and need only be microwaved. Finally sit down to stuff my face. Drink almost half a bottle of wine and…lo! I can barely hold my eyes open!
Dog bit my hand in a ball-tossing game. Drew blood, inflicted bruises, hurt like hell. Bandaids have taken to raising welts wherever I paste them on my skin. Dig out the last of the strip gauze; wrap paw tightly enough to stop bleeding. Now tomorrow I’ll have to go out and buy more of that stuff.
So Apple shipped off my MacBook to its repair shop in Tennessee, where the thing has been for the better part of a week. But before very long, they finish and ship it back. Supposed to arrive between 8 and 10 a.m. today.
Sent off a chapter to one client. Read another client’s chapter and sent that off to him.
Come 11 a.m., no sign of it. I call Apple. Their rep gets ahold of Fedex, who say their guy tried to deliver it but no one was home. Of course I was home. And Gerardo was here with four of his guys, too! I expect the guy delivered it to Josie’s house: same number as my house, same street name except “Lane,” not “Way.” Apple CSR gets the various numbers for me to try to track this down. I call FedEx and get a robo-phone runaround, so I figure I’ll drive up to the Fedex office on Meth Lover’s Lane in person.
I’m cruising across SubFeeder Street headed for Conduit of Blight — NOT my usual route, because I hate turning left at the signal at CofB and GangBanger’s Way (because of the Fucking Train), so I normally backtrack around Robin Hood’s Barn to avoid it. The intersection of CofB & Meth Lover’s is impassible with construction, so you have to drive to 23rd on Gangbanger’s Way, go north to Meth Lover’s, then right on Meth Lover’s and left on 21st. And 21st is jammed with frustrated drivers trying to get around the roadblock at CofB and Meth Lover’s. Wheeeee!
As I cross Local Lane West, I see a Fedex Truck headed in my direction. Hot DAYUM!
I lay on the horn, jump out of the car, and flag him down.
And believe it or not, HE HAS THE COMPUTER and…another believe-it-or-not… he FORKS IT OVER.
Holy mackerel. He swears he’s been here and left a notice.
Check when I get home, and by golly, he’s right: the doorbell button on the gate doesn’t ring. Must have run out of battery juice or gotten wet in the rain and ruint.
But…can you imagine? Actually encountering the guy on the way out of the ‘hood?????? Wow!
As expected, I spent the entire afternoon wrestling with the computer, trying to get it back online. It goes, but it goes slow.
Tomorrow I’ll have to spend half a day wrestling with DropBox, which seemed to be cooperating up to the point where it supposedly synced itself with the newly refurbished (i.e., key tools erased or up-gefucked) machine. After making me jump through a thousand hoops and forcing me to dream up a new goddamn password and seemingly starting the 24-hour process to sync the zillions of gigabytes worth of files I have stored in DropBox’s precincts, hours after the process has started they send me an email with some new numeric code, which they demand that I enter to “finish signing in to DropBox.” But…they don’t tell me WHERE to enter it.
So that process, which should have been about 2/3 done by tomorrow morning, is now stopped, and now I’ll have the pleasure of trying to roust a human at DB (good luck with that!) and trying to get him to explain WTF and where the hell I’m supposed to enter this magical number, and then…yes…it will be another 24 hours before my files are synced.
Yesterday VickyC and I finally made it up to Payson to visit our friends KJG and Mr. KJG in their beautiful, newly renovated home in the pines. It was wonderful to see them and to admire their lovely property.
KJG drove us around to some of her favorite haunts in Payson, a small ranching and tourist community perched at the top of the Mogollon Rim. The contrast between Phoenix’s toxic LA-style hectic traffic and the small-town vibe up there was amazing. Not once did anyone cut us off, park in the car’s blind spot, try to get-there-first, jerk around, or behave as though they were drunk, stoned, or demented. Nor did we, even once, run into a traffic jam occasioned by the city tearing up the roads.
We drove through a couple of districts where they’d looked at houses during their search for their dream house somewhere outside of the increasingly dystopic Valley of the Sun. There really are some lovely residential areas up there. And in some cases, the prices are not completely out of line. For about what I could get for my house, I could buy a nice place in town.
This, in sharp contrast with the experience of driving around lovely Phoenix on Wednesday:
I went up to the FedEx office, which is not very far from here. Really, if you didn’t have to traverse Gang Central, you could walk there from here.
First, though, I went to my favorite storefront mailboxes/xerox/notary public-type place, because a) they offer just about every service having to do with shipping, mailing, and minor office services you can dream up and b) I like those folks a lot and usually will try to give my money to people who have proven they can be nice to me. To get there, I have to cross the freeway. Main Drag South and Gangbanger’s Way are both fantastically dug up, creating backups that go halfway to Reno in one direction and halfway to Santa Fe in the other. So I figure I’ll go west across the freeway on Meth Lover’s Lane, the next main drag north of Gangbanger’s. The mail store is in a strip mall facing Meth Lover’s, westward across the freeway and on the north edge of the Ghost Mall (Gangbanger’s skirts this gigantic collection of vacancies along its south side). So it’s northward up Conduit of Blight Blvd toward Meth Lover’s, there to turn left and proceed west across the freeway.
Not. So. Much.
Every effing road in this city is torn up. Wherever you’re going, you can’t get there from here…and yesterday provided no exception to that rule.
At the intersection of Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s Lane, they’ve got the damn road shut down to one lane. No left effing turn.
Fortunately, I spot this situation from afar, and fortunately I’ve lived in Our Fair City for so long its road map is imprinted on my brain. I cut off a poor bastard in the outside lane, swerve into the two-way left-turn lane, and jerk across oncoming traffic into a light industrial area. Proceed west as far as this little street will go, dodging an 18-wheeler who’s stuck trying to turn around (thank you, God, for sparing me from having taken up that occupation!); amble to the end of the street, turn north, and follow that road up to its intersection with Meth Lover’s, figuring it’s gonna be a real bitch to turn left onto that thing. Rev up the aggressiveness hormones (drivers in Phoenix learn to control these bodily functions by sheer effort of will….), grit my teeth and…HALLELUJAH BROTHERS AND SISTERS, there’s a freaking signal at Meth Lover’s!
So I get back on my way without having to risk my life unduly. Or anyone else’s, come to think of it.
The mail store folks say they can only do UPS but they point out that I passed a FedEx store on my way there, right on Meth Lover’s Lane. Ah! I know that industrial park!
So I turn back onto Meth Lover’s, cross the freeway eastbound, come to the FedEx store, and have to turn north (left AGAIN!!!!) onto the little street that goes into the industrial park. Traffic northbound on this tiny road is SO THICK that I cannot turn left into the parking lot near the FedEx store. I figure that’s because other folks, southbound, are detouring through the industrial park to dodge the mess at Meth Lover’s Lane and Conduit of Blight. They’re all as mad as I am, and nary a one of them is about to give another motorist a break. So I proceed down Little Street till I find another driveway in the back end of the parking lot. Dart in there and then drive all the way back up to the front of the lot and get parked near the FedEx shop. No problem sending the computer off to Apple…that’s very nice.
Now I have to get home, once again circumventing the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Holy sh!t.
Noooo way of getting out of the parking lot the way I came in: cars are now backed up to Flagstaff. However, the next road to the west of Little Street is Office Complex Drive. This proceeds past the insurance company where my son works, past the former site of the branch office that the credit union so conveniently closed, and past a grassy flood-control park where I used to run my German shepherd when she was young and fierce. AND it happens to debouche onto Gangbanger’s way, which goes right past my neighborhood.
Yes!
The only problem is turning right out of the FedEx parking lot onto Meth Lover’s (circumventing the light at LIttle Street) and then darting across the fast lane (“fast” is not the operative word here…) and into the two-way left-turn lane. But thanks to the signal holding up westbound traffic at Little Street, I manage to take advantage of a Fellow Homicidal Driver’s momentary lapse in attention and dart across in front of him to turn left onto Faceless Office Building Road…only because FOB Road also has a signal.
Proceed without incident down FOB Road and reach Gangbanger’s Way. Mercifully, there’s also a signal at that intersection, allowing me to turn left onto the 7-lane main drag that is Gangbanger’s.
wooo HOOOOO! I got home alive, one more time!
This is pretty much the story of any drive you make through this accursed city, no matter where it is that you think you want to go. Wherever you’re goin’, you can’t get there from here: EVERY road is ripped up and blocked somewhere. Unless you know how to get around virtually any intersection in town, you are going to end up sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting and sitting in stalled traffic.
Later in the day, I had to make a 40-minute drive to meet a client at a Barnes and Noble over at Arrowhead Mall, way to Hell and gone on the west side. It was pushing 4 p.m. by the time this confab broke up. Rush hour here starts at 3:00 p.m. sharp.
Homeward bound, I decided to stop by the credit union on the Great Desert University’s west campus, so I could deposit the check without having to dork with scanning it and uploading two images. This entails driving east across Bell Road — one of the main drags into White Flight Country, now situated on the far west side — then veering south on 43rd Avenue to Thunderbird, and sliding onto the campus. Not too bad: since most of the rush-hour traffic consists of whiteys headed homeward — in the opposite direction from the way I had to go — this went smoothly enough. The transaction completed, now the choices are to continue east across Thunderbird to the freeway, take the freeway to Gangbanger’s, and trudge east to the ‘Hood, or else go all the way across Thunderbird to Conduit of Blight, go south several miles, and then turn east onto Gangbanger’s.
Well. You’re crazy to get on the freeway any time after 3 in the afternoon. And the alternative would take me right back to the mess at Conduit of Blight and Meth Lover’s. Luckily, though, I have that map imprinted inside the brain. So…back eastbound on Thunderbird to 35th, south toward Gangbanger’s way, and thence to the ‘Hood.
Again because this route was east- and southbound, running in the opposite direction of the blue-collar workers and cubicle-dwelling office workers who get off around 3:00 or 4:00 and head home to their styrofoam-and-stucco boxes on the west side, I escaped a lot of rush-hour congestion. But traffic coming in the opposite direction? Holeee mackerel! At the light on the east side of the freeway, westbound traffic on Gangbanger’s was backed up almost a mile. There was no incident stopping them. It was just too damn many cars for the road to handle. That is, yes, seven lanes (if you count the two-way left-turn lane as a traffic lane).
Ugh!
When I got home from this junket, I called up “real estate, Prescott” and looked at the offerings in that Californicated small town. It’s a pretty area, and my house is now worth so much that I could in fact afford to live there. And I did find a couple of cute houses…but in general, I just don’t see anything there that I sincerely would wanna live in. Problem is, my house is damn nice…you’d have to go some to beat it, or even to match it.
The other options are the Oro Valley in Tucson (think I’d ’druther live in Prescott, thank you) or Sun City. The latter would be much cheaper. But my god. Living in a mausoleum ought to be cheaper!
Payson is significantly cheaper than Prescott. However, it has a few disadvantages: it has few urban amenities such as top-rated hospitals, Costco, gourmet grocery stores or even Sprouts; little choice of veterinarians, dentists, doctors, or much of anything else. Those things, of course, are readily available in Phoenix: an hour and a half down the hill.
But… Do you really want to drive an hour and a half to get to one or the other of those?
KJG does it without a blink: she said she’d driven into the Valley to see the kids twice last week. But…she’s highly motivated.
So. I don’t know. Do I want to uproot myself to get away from the traffic, the crime, the drug-addicted transients, the heat, and the overall lunacy? Maybe. But do I really want to leave my son and all my friends? Hmmm…
View from Payson. By Doug Dolde at English Wikipedia – Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain.
Surely I’ve shared my feeling with you — explicitly or implicitly, hm? — that we live in a dystopia. Remember that old cartoon, “Life in Hell”? Well, yeah. It’s a lot like that. Only not so harmlessly absurd.
Today, a fine Day from Hell, presented a superb view of the Canyons of Dystopia. What a place! What a time!
My laptop computer — an aging MacBook, a creature that has made itself integral to my daily life, to my entertainment, and (most to the point) to my business activities — has about given up the digital ghost. It’s taken to shutting down <<~PING~>> out of the blue, sometimes losing data, sometimes not. This is happening more and more often. Uncountable numbers of hours with the telephone Apple techs (starting at 6 in the morning; extending till 10 at night) have done nothing to fix the problem.
In defeat, the Apple techs and I agreed that we were forced to present the damn thing to the Apple geniuses in a brick-and-mortar Apple store.
Naturally, Apple closed the store nearest to me. So I had to schlep the contraption out to Scottsdale.
I’d been at the new, annoying, echoey, brain-banging Apple glass-and-metal box lately installed at Scottsdale Fashion Square. So…yeah. I decided to take a chance that the slightly less-new Apple store at Scottsdale Quarter would be less…annoying.
Well.
No.
Make an appointment: 2:45 p.m.. Start driving driving driving about 2:00 p.m. Get there pretty much on time. Park in the Scottsdale Quarter’s parking garage: B-1W. Pull out my crip-space placard so I can grab a space within walking distance of an elevator or stairs, leave the chariot not very far from a pair of elevators, and make my way toward air. Trudge upstairs past innumerable trendy restaurants and trendy fashion stores and trendy home stores and finally find my way, with difficulty, to the Apple store.
Yes. Glass-and-metal box.
This shopping center is simply dreadful, in an upscale dreadful way. Cold. Hard-edged. Stylish. Ritzy. Loud to the point of blaring. And fucking annoying.
It is, in short, a little shard of dystopia. A freestanding monument to dystopia.
I finally find the Apple store in its maze, after asking at two shops. Get there on time.
Over the blaring background noise and the echo-chamber interior noise, the Apple employees and techs are extremely nice. One of them, a manager, tells me they’re a little confused because one of his employees had been carted off to an ER, about half an hour earlier, with chest pains.
A short stay in the cacophony suggests why. If you had to spend your days in that racket trying to tend to unhappy customers or peddle Apple’s wares to idle lookers, you, too, would have cardiac symptoms.
Shortly, the lone tech behind the Genius Bar decides the MacBook needs to be sent away to TechLand, therein to be evaluated and, with any luck, fixed. This is OK, sort of, because I still have the old iMac to work on. Not that sitting in front of a desk on a hard chair for hour on hour on hour is a good thing. It leaves me with every joint in my body hurting. But at least I’ll be able to make a little progress on the assignments at hand.
Now I leave the Apple store and make my way, with some annoyance, through the complicated maze that is Scottsdale Quarter. Get on the elevator and go down to level B1 West, where my car was parked. In a disabled parking space a few steps from said elevator.
Or was it?
I search all over and cannot find the Venza. Set off the key fob’s panic button: nothing.
Back on the elevator: down to level B2 west.
Same story: no fuckin’ sign of my car! I search and search but cannot find the car.
Now I figure I need to call a cop or security guard to help out. Cop? Not so much: the cell phone is in the missing car.
I go back upstairs and enter a couple of business establishments, asking if they can call up a security guard. The flunkies there haven’t a clue!
Go back downstairs and search again. Not a chance.
Back up to the main level. Find an employee: can you call a security guard or cop to help me look for my car? He hasn’t a clue. He points me to another guy. That guy pretends he doesn’t speak English, fuckyouverymuch.
Now I’m beginning to panic, because I do NOT know what I’m going to do. Has my car been stolen? Seems unlikely. But I know I parked it under a sign that said B1 West. And it ain’t there.
Finally I ascend once more to the ground level, walk around the vast building, and enter through the driveway (“no pedestrians”), and start walking. I find Level B1 East. Keep walking the maze. Eventually I arrive at a sign saying “Level B1 West,” but don’t see my car. I start walking further down into the depths of Hell when out of the corner of my eye I spot the damned Venza: on the other side of the elevators from where I was searching. Not before, we might add, quite the little panic attack.
Never been so happy to drive away from a place in my life.
I made my escape through the west side of Kierland Commons, past block on block of excruciatingly pricey Soviet-style, perfectly ghastly-looking block apartments. Horrible-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places. Very expensive horrible, ghastly-looking, dreary, barren, depressing places.
You know… I think of myself of fairly ritzy-titsy. North Central Phoenix, where I’ve dwelt since 19-and-aught-67, is what would be called, in a venue such as San Francisco, “Old Money.” And let’s face it: despite my protestations of penury here at the ironically titled Funny about Money, I am, yes, damn near rich as Croesus.
But as for the amazingly, hideously dystopic environs of Scottsdale’s astonishingly ugly Kierland Commons district? I am SO FAR out of my league in that place! Dear God. I hear Yarnell a-callin’….
It’s so harshly dystopic that it actually makes dreary, dumpy Sun City look good. It certainly makes Prescott look very fine, indeed.
Lemme tellya: if I were a young woman today, you couldn’t pay me — not in the currencies of love nor money — to bring a child into this land of ours. To bring an infant into the godawful world we live in today would be a form of child abuse. It should be actionable.
Image: By Cygnusloop99 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7863726
