Category: Inspiration –

– Monday, December 9th, 2024 -8˚C / +18˚F, Dark & Cloudy @ 10:30pm Atlantic Time, = here in Atlantic Canada, A.K.A. the Maritimes – { WordPress doesn’t like the word ‘Maritimes’ } & it’s my first natural born next generation cousin, Kathy’s Birfday for another hour and a half here – little bit longer where she is. I was working as the { Nickname: ‘Gopher’ } @ the Bridgeport Post Newspaper when she was born – I told one of the women who worked on the ‘Society’ page of the Sunday Edition – about my brand new cousin – and she sort of interviewed me – found a photo of my Aunt, Claudia, {Kathy’s mother} somewhere in the paper’s ‘Morgue’/archives – and ran a little article about the happy occasion. I didn’t expect that } <— Redundancy is like Deja Vu all over again, like Deja Vu all over again?

-“I worked with this guy in the US Postal System – before I fell in love with a Canadian and told myself I didn’t have to put up with the Postal Supervisors insane bullying. I couldn’t stand watching ice-holes pick on people who were vulnerable while some of the best and nicest and most dedicated people in the world delivered the mail -“

— Jay Moran, above, was one of the very good ones. He and a group of his closest work friends made working in the US Post Office system almost tolerable in spite of the jerks who wanted to sabotage the Post Office and sell it off to Private industry.

— The ‘manager’ of the Stratford, Connecticut Branch of the Bridgeport, Connecticut post office, vandalized a parking garage because he was pissed off  over the fact that parking had always been on a first come, first served, basis. He believed that as a supervisor his exalted position warranted a reserved parking spot just for him. When the grievances were filed and the supervisors and Post Master realized they probably could not win his case, he snarled about that and told everybody in a morning lecture that he had decided to let the old ways continue.

— He also sent an African American Custodian out to buy stuff at a hardware store and laughingly told one of the injured guys on light duty to quickly go and grab that custodian’s parking spot so he’d have to park out on the side street, and when the custodian got back from that errand and did park on that street, the manager called the Stratford Police Department and demanded they ticket people parking in the street because they were preventing legitimate customers from access to good parking.

— The same manager couldn’t stand the idea that two African American women clerks could sit on stools while they worked when he had been told by the higher up the food chain supervisor he called ‘They Psycho” {Second supervisor in the hierarchy below the Post Master – that if he { the psycho ] ever caught him { the manager, also nicknamed ‘The Snake” } if the [psycho ever caught the snake sitting on his [ butt ] while the letter carriers were working to get their routes together and get out in time to finish in time – He { the snake } would be flipping hamburgers for a living. The two women – one was six months pregnant and the other had just had planter warts surgically removed from her feet. – The manager/snake invented a false complaint from a customer who – the snake said – found the pregnant woman asleep at the counter and when he woker up, she was verbally abusive to him { the make-believe customer }. I was the clerks’ steward – the snake told me about the letter, I said, “Show me the letter, I’ll write to that guy and explain that she’s six months pregnant – and -” the snake looked at me, shook his head, disgusted, and walked away – two weeks later he told me he “had to remove the stools from behind the counter because he got a complaint from a customer – et cetera, like he thought I would forget his earlier attempt to sell me the same lie? I responded the same, “Let me see the letter – I’ll write to the guy and explain that those two women have to sit down, one’s six months pregnant and the other just had surgery on her feet -” and he walked away shaking his head again. And then, less than a week later – he { the snake }  looked at me, and went to the counter and then – singing a little nonsense song to himself to make sure I noticed what he was doing – he walked away from the counter swinging the two stools as he walked to his office where he hid the stools from the clerks. I filed a grievance – and with my detailed written witness account listing his lies and continued attempts to remove the stools, and other witness account to the ‘psycho’ threatening the ‘snake’ with losing his job – the supervisors above the snake in the post office supervisory food chain wouldn’t let that grievance get to anywhere where that kind of racist shenanigans could be made public.

—And, during his on going campaign to get the African American Custodian fired – and/or ‘give him the treatment’ to the point where he’d quit – He, and the Psycho – wanted to get rid of a Hispanic American Letter Carrier – the snake unlocked the windows on the carrier’s jeep at least twice while no one was watching, but the carrier did notice that the windows were not locked each time, wondered if somebody had used his jeep to deliver special delivery stuff before the carriers came to work, and forgot to lock the windows closed the first time, and the carrier wondered if he’d been so distracted that he didn’t lock the windows back up the second time – and there was one street on his route with a hill, he’d have to go up and over the hill and would lose sight of the jeep for several minutes while he delivered the mail on the other side of that hill { And the carriers were all told where they had to park their jeeps where supervisors cruising around, checking on them, could spot their jeeps and know where they were, know whether they were on time or not and know they weren’t ‘goofing off’-  hiding somewhere – When the Hispanic letter Carrier came back up over the hill both the snake and the ‘psycho’ were trying their damnedest to pull the windows open so they could charge the carrier with ‘Failure to properly preserve the sanctity of the mail in his charge-‘ which – the psycho had already told me what he could do to get rid of dead weight – would be one more step they could charge him with to eventually get him fired for not working up to the standards the post office required of its employees. When he got to his jeep and the snake and the psycho were standing there, the carrier asked, “Can I help you with something?” and the snake and the psycho hissed and snarled and stomped off to their car and drove away,

— -My skin wasn’t thick enough to put up with the insane bullying done by too many US Post Office Supervisors – But the conscientious, dedicated guys who delivered the mail, sorted the mail and packages behind the scenes, and worked the counter and sold stamps and other post office services, were danged nice people.

— I could believe in those nice people and tell myself there was enough good in the post office – but the supervisors who lied on official documents and tried to get away with vandalizing to try to get themselves a designated parking space – and sent people off their prescribed routes so they could be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time – That wore me down – I came down with pneumonia three times in two years and my doctor said, maybe I should think about getting a job with less stress.

— And then somebody who needed love and attention and positive reinforcement told me she loved me and I tried to make that work, in New York State – five hundred miles away. And while I was five hundred miles away the snake tried to have me arrested for vandalizing the jeeps that were in the carrier’s lot. One of the carriers told me about that a couple years later while I was visiting family ‘back home’.

“Our Driveway, wasn’t quite this pretty today-“

— Within the past couple days – we got a little more snow than what shows above – and learned that our snow blower is on strike –  but the driveway was clear enough to satisfy the love of my life and that really matters. { I didn’t go outside and take any iPhone photos while there was enough daylight to say so -}

-“One of two laptops working overtime to try to keep up with me…” –

— The above laptop – with its two larger additional monitors is on my left side right now, north of me? – I’m facing east, with another laptop and its two external monitors working just as hard as the monitors to the north – the laptop to the east is something like six months younger than the one to my left.

—Details? okay – the tall slim monitor to the right in the above photo – plays host to two pages of “Open Office” writer – the free version that, thankfully, is NOT “Micro-Schnarr  Wyrd” the tall monitor {well, it’s a wide monitor that doesn’t mind being tipped on its side } Holds two pages that I can copy and paste back and forth from the top page to the bottom or bottom to top. the 4K monitor on the left should be handy for messing with photos and screen shots that I’ve been trying to incorporate into a WordPress ‘Blog’ – and/or – the 4K monitor can hold apps and pages that hold email and other things that I want to use to find and attach paragraphs and graphics to email messages that are responses to friends, family, and extended family. { I could qualify for the position of poster boy for health care Public Service ads that support the message, “Multi-Tasking’ Definitely IS  a very dangerous threat to your health and peace of mind.” }

— That’s not all. While I’m copying and pasting stuff into one of my blogs and editing stuff that I think is important over there on the left – The really important writing stuff is to the east, on the other laptop, in in front of me. I’ve got something that I thought I could finish editing and maybe even self-publish and send out as holiday presents to people who might appreciate the fact that I finished something and published it, but would probably rather sit at a table and accept the cold wet bean from the baby J.D. Salinger mentioned near the end of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ – or even undergo dental surgery without an anaesthetic than read ‘hard copy’.

— Now here’s the problem – With the latest ‘you gotta have this’ updates and upgrades to the operating systems on both these laptops – they no longer keep the batteries fully charged. They believe they’re clever as hell as they answer, ‘How the fupp do I turn off the b.s. pain in the rump routine where-in you ice-holes believe that not keeping my laptops’ batteries fully charged is the most wonderful idea you idiots have had and implemented since Steve Jobs probably walked away from your Corporate bull-chips shaking his head, thinking he should have shot most of you instead of letting you join the company the two Steves so lovingly gave birth to?’ —> Um, they answer legitimate questions without the nasty descriptive attacks on their integrity – with double talk and patting themselves on their backs, bragging about how wonderful their idea is and saying the laptop batteries don’t like being charged over capacity or even being kept up to full charge … but older laptops never had a problem remaining fully charged, and never developed problems that made using them an exercise in incredible frustration:

— But don’t’cha think it might be just as easy and even more wonderful to add a couple lines of programming to their routines and Not try to charge the bleep bleep batteries when they’re fully charged, but get the danged things up to full charge and let them sit and dream and – Or maybe even add a manual switch to let the stupid power from the ‘charger’ run the computer while it’s connected – and only charge the stupid batteries when they need a charge?

— Ya know how I know that their cutesy poo question-deflecting bull-chip non- answers to ‘How do I turn off your gawd danged “Charging is on Hold because you rarely use your computer on battery only” fupping message?’ —> Because when the gawd awful batteries have only been recharged to 80% the 4 K monitor blinks off and on – more off than on – so it’s basically un-useable. I can’t do anything while the screen is black because I can’t move the bleepitty bleep bleep mouse cursor to where it needs to be to help me edit, select, copy and/or paste anything – and when I move something to the laptop’s ‘built-in display’/monitor – it’s too fupping small – I need a gawd danged magnifying glass to read anything on that screen.

— Remember when Apple Computer’s greatest claim to fame was that it was a lot more user-friendly than the alternatives? I do. Apple went to hell when they tried to be friends with Bill Gates and allowed him to include his internet exploder browser with the bundle of new software that came with new computers. & That was before he publicly admitted that he believed this world would be a lot better off if the powers that believe they should be in charge of everything went and reduced the population of this world back down to something like under 500,000,000, or maybe even 500,000 – { Look that up. } & – Remember when Monsanto’s radio ads called itself the ‘Grocer to the World” instead of what we’re getting now = “Either we stop Monsanto or Monsanto will be the end of the Human Race.”

— Some smug ice-hole would probably sneer at me and say, “The solution to your problem is simple, upgrade to the latest computers with the latest operating system… and blah blah blah -” Yeah – right. buy me a new super computer that I can’t afford – every year and that won’t even shut the morons up …

— Planned Obsolescence is a Crime in France, and should be – Everywhere! —

~~~~~ Jim