My computer wouldn’t start today, it just beeped at me, and I just about had a seizure, I kid you not. Turns out it was just dust and dog hair that needed to be blown out of the machinery, thank God. Because I can’t afford to get it fixed, being on unemployment, and I can’t afford to NOT get it fixed, seeing as I have no way to make a living without the Internet.
The company I worked for went virtual six years ago, and based on that fact, and the fact that there were no raises in sight, and no where to go but sideways, me, my daughter, my fiancee, and his many animals moved to a small town in the south where I could afford to buy a house, such as it is.
The house would most likelyhave been condemned if we’d bothered to have it inspected, which we did not. We needed a cheap house with property, for my fiancee’s dogs and garden. I mean really cheap, as in we bought the house for less than some people pay for their vehicles. The reason being that I was a single mother who had put herself through school while her daughter was in diapers, which amounted to quite a lot of debt by the time I got out. And as my now-husband is an entertainer and mostly “on the road”, all bills as well as the care and feeding of animals soon fell to me. And yard work, though thankfully the proposed garden has never materialized, as house plants quake in my wake.
One fine day, when the recession was well under way, my former company, never to be left out of a trend, decided to lay off the entire technical support department and replace us with one completely incompetent and uneducated soul who lived locally, and was therefore able to sit in a cubicle in-house where the new operations manager could keep a strong eye on her and call her in to meetings and such. The job mainly entailed supporting the company’s proprietary software, for which there is no external help. All manuals were written by me. All fixes found by me. There is nothing external to Google. In the end the child was so incompetent, I released all my tools and notes knowing that they would just sit idle on her hard drive. And so now the programmers provide the technical support, but at least they only pay the salary of one support person, and not three.
Which is all to explain that I’m here, in this small town with double digit unemployment and some of the lowest wages in the nation, and pretty much stuck trying to make a living selling my services via the Internet. Hence, the rant against the beeping computer. If your computer beeps, and the pc won’t load up properly (resulting in a black screen), get out your handy can of compressed air and start spraying.
Best,
McKee