LIVING WRONG

I must be living the wrong way somehow or other. I have no passion 
for dealing with customers, whether they're happy or angry, though 
the latter has increasingly potent negative affects on me. I try to 
achieve projects to sustain or improve my lifestyle and I stuff 
everything up. The solution to one problem is the cause of the 
other. Ask on the internet and get a mound of advice that doesn't 
work. Who wants to spend the time on it anyway? Everyone else makes 
so much money per hour that only an idiot would try doing things 
like that himself instead of just buying a new one. Can't buy a new 
one that fits on your old machine? Buy a new machine. Can't afford 
it? Borrow the money, you've just got to keep that hateful job that 
you can't really do properly either paying for the next lifetime 
and a half and you'll be fine. Heck you might die first anyway and 
then you've got away with much of it for free, you lucky bugger.

I had lots of projects planned for the Easter long weekend, and the 
one I succeeded at was improving how I had Firefox set up. Software 
that I don't want to use in the first place, for which I've already 
wasted enormous amounts of time 'improving' things because it's 
from such an awkward and unusable base to begin with. With any 
other such software I wouldn't use it to begin with, but it's that 
or Chrome which is even worse, or the lightweight browsers which I 
use most of the time anyway but won't tell me whether the store I'm 
going near today has a product in stock unless I run the Google 
Maps Javascript so I can enter my postcode and find out my nearest 
stores which I already knew by heart (the relevent one depends on 
which town I'm travelling to anyway since no store is actually 
'near' by website standards, sometimes I have to fake my postcode 
to get any results at all!). The one in the town I'm going to today 
didn't stock welding gas anyway as it turns out. A Web search 
turned up a welding supplies store, though in Dillo their store 
page didn't show any products. Back to Firefox again, enable 
scripts, oh still no products in any sub-category. Oh that script 
was from "Squarespace", a mob I remember advertising on TV about 
making websites for small businesses. Obviously it's just a 
template where the Squarespace guy didn't actually bother filling 
more than a handful of their products in (if they really do even 
sell those products). Still I bet that guy earns shitloads more 
than me. I bet he doesn't need to teach himself how to weld up his 
rusty car himself because he can't afford to pay a panel beater and 
wouldn't really trust them even if he could because they're 
probably just another half-arsed fool ripping people off because 
unlike me they don't give a stuff if an angry customer mouths of at 
them. They all make lots of money that way, like everyone except me.

So my success was maintaining my little window into that world. I 
could look out my window and see trees, grass, birds, cows. Nothing 
else that speaks, nothing else I have to speak to. Or I could go 
onto Gopher with software that hasn't needed touching in thirty 
years and read other people babbling bullshit like me. But no, I 
spend hours tweaking my little window into the Web: That place 
crafted only to work in specific major Web browsers at the instant 
that a Web developer last worked on each website. Old versions? 
Don't care. Alternative browsers? Ha! Hilarious. That's my 
achievement of four days, improving my window into that little 
cyber hell. Everything else I stuffed up.

Ok not entirely true. The back wall of the shed no longer has a 
huge hole in it from where the corrigated iron has been gradually 
blowing away for years. That was a bit of work to put right. The 
idea was I'd get that done on the first day with my father's help 
holding the sheets of iron up, then finally have a less windswept 
environment in which to work on my car. But that took too long, my 
father had other commitments for the rest of the long weekend, and 
so no time for him to move his farm equipment in the shed from the 
space I need to work on the car. So no actual result. I tried one 
job I could do on the car without jacking it up, and failed 
miserably in various attempts. I dug deep holes for footings for 
the water tank stand behind the house where I want my backup 
gravity-fed water tank / bath tub and satellite dish 4G antenna 
assembly on top of. But I hit rock, which means they can't go where 
I want them to short of house-destroying excavations. I'm going to 
have to rethink that whole design. But the tank/dish frame design I 
finished already failed anyway, when the wood/metal shrank my DIY 
brackets for holding the lid down pulled the lid apart at the 
screws - another complete redesign needed (I never thought it would 
shrink so much!). 4G signal is dropping out more with the weather 
getting slightly damper, and this is pretty much in drought 
conditions so far this year, it could become unusable if things 
ever actually get wet again, which is when 4G signal used to get 
really poor.

But it's all the rest of the world imposing these things on me. 
Transporting me to it digitally or physically. I can sit looking at 
the paddocks, or reading a book in the sunlight. I won't make money 
doing it, but I don't have to spend money to do it either (in other 
news the cost of my internet access has gone up now, while my 
monthly data allowance has gone down). Then again I can read T. E. 
Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom from a time before all this 
technology, where he was thrust into a world of ancient nomadic 
living amongst the Bedouin Arabs to help them fight the Turks in 
WWI, and he became thoroughly depressed. Basically from the 
frustrations of dealing with people and balancing his own sense of 
right and wrong against the needs of his country. He's surprisingly 
relatable in some ways, and proof that it's not really my pursuit 
of technology that's the problem. In his case most people conclude 
that he was the problem - going crazy with the stress of it all. 
I'm probably my own problem too, but I don't want to be fixed. I 
just need to figure out if there's a workable lifestyle that really 
suits me.

 - The Free Thinker