Several people agree with me about this one....

 

 

About a week ago, a headhunter called me about a possible position.  However, I was considered too rusty for them to refer to my former employer.  After chatting with a couple of people I realized that this was a bottom fishing headhunter who doesn't know technology that well.  

The headline for the ad read as follows:

Job Title: Mainframe Programmer
Location: New York, NY or Pittsburgh, PA
Duration: 12 months initial contract & high possibility of extension
Need to come in the office one day/week

Since I posted the email last week, I won't post the full text again.  The fellow that runs the shop is making decisions as if the mainframe is just another set of letters in the alphabet soup of computer jargon.  As such, one would want the freshest of skills in any person being presented to a prospective client.  However, no one is being trained for mainframes anymore, and several people say that many firms are desperate to temporarily hire retirees to get them to the point where their old systems can be retired.

Given that the headhunter and I have no written contract or obligation to work with each other, or to keep each other's secrets, I will probably contact people I know who might still work at the old place.  Who knows, I might just get lucky....

 

Until I find my new normal, I look both ways....

 

I often find myself thinking of mistakes I made in the past and what I could have done differently.  No, I can not change the past, nor do I regret many of the decisions I have made.  Instead, I want to learn as much as possible from my past, and make sure that I don't make similar mistakes in the future.

- - - - - - 

When crossing a road, we are taught to look both ways before crossing.  Now, I look both at the past and my future to figure out what I want to do next in life.  For example, I looked at my most recent past relationship, and realized that I needed to place a higher emphasis on communication in a relationship, instead of just getting along too smoothly.  I also look at the future, and wonder if someone like FH would be what I need.  She is not shy about making her needs known to me, and can drive me up the wall sometimes while doing so - and I'm glad she can do this, given the failure of my recent past.

I also wonder whether I should stay in the workforce as a full time worker, and whether I would work as Mario or Marian.  If I were to get a receptionist or office worker type position, I want to work as Marian.  There is something I like about appearing as a professional woman that fits my image of myself as Marian.  Yet, I like the image of a technical worker that I was as Mario. Which path should I choose if both were to be open to me at the same time?

It's not easy making these decisions, as I will have to live with them for a long while.  But I am glad that I'm in a position to make these decisions, instead of being held back by fear.

Getting out too late to see the sun.

 

There are parts of me that should have been born in another era. For example, I would have liked to have traveled by train across the US in the age of peak passenger rail - even with all of the headaches of doing this kind of trip. I would have loved to see people such as Benny Goodman, Chuck Berry, and Dave Brubeck in person in their prime.  But I would have felt out of place, as well as being crippled, as my life has been defined by the ever growing importance of computers in our lives.

Today, I decided to stay indoors and watch old movies on the TV.  The selections I had to choose from would not have been available to me in a pre-computer age.  Not only could I select a movie I wanted to see from several libraries available to me. But I could view the movie without having to load film reels onto a projector for viewing.  While the movies were on the TV, I could surf the web from a tablet computer - something I never would have dreamed possible when I first came in contact with computers half a century ago.  So, the movement of the sun in the sky has much less meaning to me today than it would have meant had I been around a century ago.

When I finally took my daily shower, I knew that I'd be going out to the grocery store as the sun was setting, and coming home in the dark. My life is only loosely tied to the sun.  But it is still connected with the weather outside.  For example, as I write this entry, the weatherman predicts a small snow storm for tomorrow, where 1"-2" inches of snow will need to be plowed away.  A couple of days later, the same weatherman is predicting 12"-18" of snow to be dumped in my area of the New York City suburbs.  Since I hate shoveling snow, I've started to consider the idea of driving North of Albany, NY early that day, staying the night, and taking a leisurely drive home the following afternoon.  Is it worth the gas and driving to get out of shoveling snow?  Who knows?  But I'll make that decision in a couple of days, then plan accordingly.

 - - - - - -

Lately, I've been in contact with someone I used to communicate with on a daily basis.   It's nice to be back in contact again.  But I'm being careful, as I don't want to be hurt or to cause hurt.  (It took 3 years for me to repair things with my brother, and it took the death of my wife as a catalyst for this to happen.  I don't want similar trauma to either get in the way of a rapprochement or a disconnection. )  I'll keep my readers informed as things progress.

Tech Support is no fun when dealing with people with no technical aptitude

 

Some people are totally clueless when it comes to technology. My friend Pat is one of them.  She has no ability to describe a problem, nor does she know when NOT to supply superfluous information when it is not called for. I often hate helping her out, as she is a person who has no aptitude to manipulate the simplest of technical ideas.

- - - - - -

Recently, Pat asked me for help with two things: to install a printer on her new computer, and to fix an undefined problem with her TV.  So, I attacked the problem with the TV first.  When her daughter from California last visited, she gave pat both a new TV and a new Apple computer. The daughter helped Pat cut the programming cord with the local cable company, and set the TV up to use her daughter's shared YouTube TV and Netflix accounts via a Roku device.  Unfortunately, Pat had no understanding of what the daughter did with the TV, nor did she have any of the fine manuals (I normally substitute another word for "fine" here) that came with her equipment. 

Since Pat did not know where the TV's remote could be found (she uses the Roku device to turn on the TV and to control the volume on the TV), I had to experiment with the buttons on the side of the TV to get at the settings for the TV. I was doing this blind, and Pat kept telling me that one of her friends fixed a problem like this with something on her cable box's remote. Pat was getting quite annoying, there was nothing about the cable box remote that could be the cause of the problem, and it took me a while to get Pat to stop offering me help with distracting, useless information.

Eventually, I found the TV's remote, and I was easily able to reconfigure the TV to use its original working configuration.  Somehow, the TV was accidentally switched to use HDMI2 for input instead of HDMI1.  Once I updated the settings, there was another problem.  Pat didn't know how to get to YouTube TV.  There are two similar icons in Roku that access YouTube related services, and I had to figure out which one to use.  Again, Pat got in the way of this when I told her which icon NOT to use before finding the correct icon to use for her to get the TV programming she wanted.  She wanted to know WHY she shouldn't use the icon and wouldn't stop trying to get an answer when I was telling her to simply not use the icon.  AARGH!  As much as I'd be a bad teacher, she'd be a student that I'd flunk because she can't master the material.  A minute later, I found the icon, and Pat was happy.

Next, leave it to Pat to get totally confused when using Netflix.  After one logs into Netflix, one is presented with a featured program, a description of it, and the option to select other movies/shows in its library. When I tried to explain what is on the screen, she couldn't find anything - and she was looking at the screen.  For example, the phrase "now trending" (or something like that) was in the middle of the screen on the left, she couldn't find it - even when I walked over to the screen and pointed it out. After scrolling down, I'd say: "remember where 'now trending' was found?" and she couldn't remember where it was to find the next topic.  She is totally hopeless with technology, and needs someone with infinite patience to guide her in its use.

By the time we were finished with the TV, I was in no mood to help Pat install a new printer on her new Apple computer.  Pat would be less than helpful with the installation process, and even if I were able to install the printer on her Apple, I'd likely have problems that I couldn't diagnose or repair remotely. (I use a PC, and can use tools I have to fix things remotely if needed.  Unfortunately, they don't work with Apple equipment.)  The last thing I need is to get sucked into being Apple tech support for her. So, I'm glad that this didn't happen on this visit.

PS: On an unrelated note, I found out that I wasn't receiving notifications for comments needing moderation.  I've done so for about 20 posts.  Sorry I missed so many of them over the months!

 

 

 

 

Quick - Find me a 5th Grader!

 

The older I get, the more I find people who are totally uncomfortable with technology. It never ceases to amaze me how well the old joke fits with these people:

"It's so easy, that a 5th grader could understand it.  Quick - Find me a 5th grader!"

And yes,what comes naturally to me is so awfully impossible for some people....

- - - - - -

The other day, one of the two women I've been dating wants to buy a computer to do her work remotely.  So we run over to the local Micro Center to pick up a new computer, and then install it.  Everything is running well until we have to set up the computer on the home network - and then things go sour.  She has left all the technology decisions to her daughter, and her daughter is nowhere around to tell us the password/passphrase used to authenticate us on the home router. As a result, we can't complete setting up the computer.

Last night, she tries to reach me while I'm at work, to figure out how to connect the software she needs to perform her business tasks. Not only is she having a hard time installing the Chrome browser, but she is having conflicts due to Microsoft trying to force her to use its Edge browser and cloud services as part of the standard Windows-10 setup.  So I agree to drive down after work to help her get her software running - and this means that I will need to do a quick change from female to male presentation before going to see her.

I'll bet that whatever problem I find will be relatively simple for me to fix.  And I'll bet that she gets in the way of me fixing it, as she will be nervous due to not understanding what's going on.  If I can't fix it, I'll let her know.  But it's likely an easy problem to resolve, and I feel confident that I can get her up and running before she works with her first client.

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