What Time Is It? What TIme Is Time?

I woke up early, felt good without knowing why, and had to check multiple time pieces to be sure I had not slipped through some crackle in time.

The thought was not completely without basis. My PC at home suddently did not know what time it was yesterday. I suspect the internal battery has once again died. That PC has gone through 5 or 6 internal batteries. 

It’s the first PC I ever had where the existence of a battery was even known to me. It kinda surprised me but apparently it’s the only way the PC can stay synced to the time servers.

I’d like to be a time server. i could so mess with humanity if I could wrest just a little bit of control over time away from the forces of nature and the obstinance of technology’s continuous monitoring of time. I came to loath FB for a lot of reasons but one early dismay was its insistence on showing how much time had passed between my last gesture and my current inhaling of air. 9 seconds ago i posted something inane and prattlous. I want those 9 seconds back.

Or do I? Do I want those 9 seconds back or do I simply regret sacrificing them to someone else’s product? 

Mental Decongestment

I cleaned house a little yesterday. An old office chair that had lingered in place for almost a year is finally gone. What remains to be hauled away are an old dead printer, a microwave, and I forget what else. A few other objects and clutter gone have given my mind a feeling of decongestment. 

These feelings these days, of some kind of happiness with my life, I don’t know what to do with it. I know I shouldn’t talk about it. No one wants to hear from you when you are happy. I don’t think it’s because happiness is boring but because no one wants to believe you when you say you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning.

Still, my inner demons are not lost, and they are not idle. I have considerable emotional phlegm in my system. A lot of ugliness, anger, and portions of my mind that drown in self-doubt and self-loathing. This will never change.

Maybe this light is burning brightest before it burns out. 

Smart Meters Not So Smart?

I don’t know if Con Ed’s new Smart Meters are actually Smart or if, like almost anything whose makers and evangelists call it Smart, it ends up being pretty damn stupid.

Since the Smart Meters went in about 2½ months ago I have not paid a dime for gas or electric. One billing statement claimed I had some jackpot in credit on my account, while another statement said something quite different. 

I don’t remember the difference now, without the two statements in front of me. But I called ConEd yesterday to inquire why I have not been billed and why statements all arrive showing $0.00 due while also showing that I had used x amount of dollars worth of power.

During Covid they quit doing meter readings. At the same time I cut back significantly on usage, puzzled as to why my bills remained so high. I did not realize they had stopped doing readings. When readings resumed I was given about 3 months credit for the decreased usage.

I don’t know if something like that is happening here but whatever is going on I got no answer yesterday becasue the call with a Con Edison rep was terminated with no warning or explanation.

Now I’m left worrying that there is no money pot of credit on my account and that I’m going to get socked with a bill for 3 or 4 months all at once. 

Talking to ConEd turned up some oddities, which I guess should not surprise me having been a customer for so long. They still had a (212) phone number on file for me from the job I got fired from over 20 years ago. It took some mining of this mind but eventually I remembered that 212-522-7023 was, indeed, my direct line at Time-Warner. 

But in the course of this discussion I flabergastedly suggested that 212-255-2748, the number for Payphone Radio, somehow got onto that account?

It was not that number, nor was it my other (212) line. No, it was a number I punched roughly 27 years ago, when I first started at Time-Warner.

It seems everything is stored forever. I once had a domain name, or more of an anti-domain name. Who knows what it was but something like f59vvzcg7v-d-bjvffsodger-ivgpvl-dfbhff.com. I registered it as a joke and let it expire after one year.

But in a chat with GoDaddy over 10 years later the rep commented on what an unusual domain name that was. I was like, that’s still in the system? I gues they have some kind of accountability or compliance reasons to store that stuff forever.