Traffic jam, Detour ahead, Expect delays

Jackie Pester likes it when I write about my commute on the beautiful Dunlap Highway (L-51). Here’s a sad one. As you may already know, I try to maintain a strict policy of transparency and candor. After all, you never know when the White House will call and you always want to be able to lay your record out on the table so that there aren’t any skeletons in your closet that the Senate confirmation hearings will drag out. Besides, you’re bound to read about it in the Denison papers eventually anyway, if you haven’t already.

A couple weeks ago, it was such a gorgeous day, and there weren’t a lot of farmers out disking yet, I just sort of forgot myself. I was driving along, enjoying nature’s Spring fashions- the buffing trees, the greening hay, the many calves and I thought to myself…

"This is SO much nicer than L.A.- no traffic whatsoever, I rarely even see another vehicle and have never seen a police car along this route in three years.

"Oh, wait, there’s actually ONE car in the oncoming lane. Say, I wonder what make and model that is anyway, most everybody around here drives GM, no, no this looks more like a Ford product…

"As a matter of fact, I bet that’s a Crown Vic-

"Aren’t those the ones used by the highway pa-

The trooper was very nice and very patient with me. After this past week with Minnesotan prisoners escaping to the Loess Hills, I’m glad that the Iowa State Patrol is in our area after all.

Speaking of highway trouble, you have no idea how much trouble I go through on the Information Superhighway trying to get this column to you every week.

Take last week’s column for instance. Usually I write this on Friday during my free period and try to email it in to Ann or Bonnie after school before I go home. Goes without saying that we didn’t have school on Good Friday. Since we had an early dismissal on Thursday, I thought I’d just write it up and send it after school Thursday and still get home early. But the best laid plans run awry.

Since they’re building a new school right next to the old one in Dunlap, they decided to cut the power almost immediately after all the students cleared out. Dang, fall back on plan ‘B.’

I got up just as early as I normally would have on Friday so that I could write it on the old home computer. But alas, since with two small children, we never have time to use the internet at home and we both have access at work, we canceled our service, thinking we’d save the $14.95 a month. Okay, need a plan ‘C’- got it! The farm! Mom-in-law’s at work, Dad-in-law’s out doing whatever farmers do before they can plant. They won’t mind if I email it from their place.

"Oof! Won’t connect. Ah ha, connected! Oof- cut out on me. Yeah, back on!"

"What’s this? Can’t access Hotmail account? What about ‘disabled Cookies?’ No problem, I’m a technologically literate guy, I think I know how to ‘enable cookies,’ here we go…

"What? Come on you hunk of sillicon!!" Grrr, half an hour later I’d gotten no where and was supposed to have met Bethany & the girls at Wal-Mart to get Grace’s birthday picture taken. I gave up and drove in to the big ‘D.’

We had to hustle back to Charter Oak to make the girl’s hair cut appointments. I gingerly ask Cindy if I can up load the column from their home computer.

"Sure, why not?" she offers.

"Thanks a million!" I scramble up their stairs to get it done and get on with life. No such luck. Beautiful new computer, Windows XP or NT or XL or something other than Windows ’98. The thing tells me that it can’t read my floppy disk because it’s "unformatted."

Now I am technologically literate enough to know that if I had reformatted my disk it would erase everything on it, including the column. Sigh.

"Why don’t we just drive up to Mapleton and give them your disk?" asked Bethany. Because Mike has all Apples at the Paper and I write the column on a PC. Macs can’t read PC disks anymore than new PCs seem to be able to read old PCs. Somehow Cyberspace interprets things, if I email it to them, they can read it. Make sense?

Now we’re on to Plan ‘D,’ I think. It’s hard to keep track. Anyway, we needed to go back to Denison for groceries, so we thought we’d use the good old public library computers. Thank God for American Democracy and God Bless Dale Carnagie, or was it Andrew Carnagie?

Library computer # 1- On the internet, into Hotmail! Hot dog, the furthest I’ve gotten so far. Compose mail, attachments…

"Program has executed illegal operation, fatal error, program will be shut down"

"AAAAURGH!!!"

Library Computer # 3- On the internet, into Hotmail, attachments…. "Internal Error"

"Doh (like Homer Sipmson would say), okay, okay, think, it’s probably some kind of a safety/security block, there’s probably a way around it…." So I decide to open the document and cut and paste it into the email instead of attaching it. No dice, no way to get into the floppy drive- wait! Aha! I open Microsoft Word (the program) and get into the document from there. Cut, paste, send! Alleluia, at last!

So then Tuesday morning I received an email from Bonnie about all the errors in the dumb thing.

And now today, as I write this (a week before you read it) guess what? The PC in my classroom can not connect to the school’s network, let alone the internet. But, hey, it’s done, at 9:10 am on Thursday the 24th, before kids show up for class, it’s done. If only I had a way to get it there.
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