William Lobb

Author

#writing

It Doesn’t Make Any Sense

I’ve been looking at this photo all morning. I’m trying to imagine the guy working in the factory, the guy driving the 20 year old pick-up truck, the guy whose kids eat hot-dogs and boxed Mac and cheese three days a week, and the guy has health insurance but he’s got a $5000 deductible, so he can’t afford to take the kids to he doctor anyway. His wife can’t go either, and if she gets pregnant now it’s up to god…

I’m trying to imagine what it’s like in this guy’s head. What mechanism allows him to think that the man that owns this property and lives inside this property is watching out for him. What part of this picture screams working class hero to someone, and says, “I got your back, bro…”

The person who lives in the castle in this photo would lock his doors and call his security forces if you ever saw the factory guy coming; yet to so many the guy that lives behind these walls is nothing short of a messiah, a god.

I was watching a family in Kentucky last night on the news. Half of their double-wide trailer had washed down the road and was up-ended into a gulch. But they think that the man who lives behind these walls is coming to help them.

Maybe from deep in the belly of their broke-ass lives they can’t see it. Swinging and spitting in survival mode they are too busy gasping for air to see it. They can’t fathom the people and party they vote for and support are actively destroying every social safety net to possibly make this life survivable for the factory guy and the family in Kentucky. They’ve been sold some bill of toxic patriotism that prevents them from seeing this simple fact, and told to keep working. Their reward is in the sky, by and by… oh lord.

People are sick and broke and their kids are hungry. This guy shits on a solid gold toilet, but somehow, in some dystopian reality, that’s just ok…

Written by @williamlobbauthor

Fridays Adventure in IT

My reputation for grumpiness is something I want written into my elegy. I’m sure I can count on my daughter for that.

Friday was a perfect example of (literally) 100 emails that could have been one text message. The woman from the vendor, who was very nice and I’m sure very good at her job, kept ‘reaching out’ to me. Reaching out makes me nuts, but that’s another rant. She was even ‘reaching out’ with those annoying emails that say: DO NOT REPLY ABOVE THIS LINE! (I always reply about the line, never was good at coloring inside the lines, either…) At one point I had to send an email asking what email was everyone referencing, I was lost in the emails and a hopeless sea of replies and replies to replies.

Finally the big day came, yesterday. I get a text from the client there is a Zoom meeting invite sent to my email and calendar. So, I lose my shit. My client, rightly, admonished me to “be nice!” I promise I will. For the fifth time in so many days I reiterate this can all be fixed in five minutes if I can talk to someone who understands my question…

We get on the call and manage to get all parties involved connect via zoom. Typical zoom, “I have no video!” “Can you hear me!” “There you are!” Where’d you go?” There they are!” The poor woman from the vendor is telling me and the tech, “We don’t see your video!” I reply, “You don’t need my video, I need to talk to this guy! I finally realize this is a zoom call because this guy I need to speak to is in India and zoom was the only way to get us together. Dude is fucking brillient. We are sharing DNS war stories and the vendor people are asking if we can share our screens. We both at the same time say we are on our phones and we don’t have screens to share. I think the vendor people are stunned! How can this be? No screens to share?!?

Finally I ask my big question, my buddy in India answers it. He check the DNS update on his end (from 10,000 miles away). We both marvel at how today records update in seconds, even faster the the TTL record mandates, we share some more eight, ten, twelve hour DNS record update war stories from ‘back in the day…’ He passes a comment about wave theory and I tell him I’m just starting to understand that.
I ask, “We good?” He says, “Yes!” I report back to the vendor—and I swear to Allah at this moment yet another member of her ‘team’ was joining zoom… as I say, “We’re all set!”

She says, “Ok, now we have to test it!”

Me, and my friend halfway around the world both say, “No need to test, it works…”

She doesn’t sound too sure.

They test, it worked.

I thanked the guy in India for his help and restoring my faith. I told him part of me believes this whole thing that so many of us have worked on and worked at for thirty or forty years, will one day soon crumble into a sea of dumbassery. He laughed.

I texted my client and said I lied. It took twelve minutes, not five.

I’m watching the talking heads justifying everything about Afghanistan. Words about war and deaths and trillions spent and the twin towers and September 11, and Osama Bin-Ladin, and the Soviets, and the Taliban.

My focus turned to the face of a boy, maybe eight or nine. He was standing next to an old woman wrapped in long black robe, her head covered. She looked hot and worried and scared.

Surrounding them were men in beards with guns, probably America weapons, tagelmusts covering some faces and turbans covering their heads, and vacuous eyes.

The boys face revealed only fear, confusion and a broken spirit, as if his eight years had been a long hard eight years, and now it has come to this, ugly and horrible crossroad.

Eight years old, alone and out of options, as the Americans worry about and warn of terrors and attacks. This boy’s eyes betray a world weariness impossible for his years. The terror has already arrived.

I can’t help but think if we’d sent pencils and paper and teachers and books and built schools after the Russians left instead of bombs if this picture would have played out differently. We had that choice as the 1980s, into the 1990s. The American war machine chose bombs.

https://williamlobb.com/1822-2/

Unplugged and Alive

My dad had a deep and abiding respect for shade and ’51 Ford Shoebox convertible vent windows. I’m quite sure he never slept a night of his life in air conditioning.

While I never did come across bad shade, I accompanied him many days on the quest for good shade. Expansive oak trees seemed to be the best place to find ’the good shade,’ the cool shade.

My father worked hard, and every day, but he was less busy than me. He found time to seek the good shade. If the day was too hot we’d drop the top on that Shoebox—by hand of course, the motor burned out about the same year I Love Lucy debuted— and, top down with those vent windows open wide, so as to shoot the hot sticky air back into your face, we’d take a ride to ‘cool off.’

We never really cooled off, I’m sure, until September, or we jumped in a pond. His favorite was up on my uncles farm, a deadly summer pool alive with snakes that I was certain would end me long before my eighth birthday.

Summer nights sitting and sweating on the front porch, of a house, on a dead end dirt road, by a swamp—he insisted was a lake—trying to decide if the mosquitoes were worse than the heat inside.

The songs of the Bush Crickets, and Dad’s Pall Mall cigarette glowing in the dark, smack dab in the middle of the 20th Century.

Unplugged and alive.