Internet Outage

(Photo by Luther Gerlach)

Oh my! Went to bed with internet working, got up and it didn't. I won't go through the narrative, but I was on the phone for three literal (not figurative) hours with my internet provider trying to right their wrongs. I've had the phone to my ear while crawling under the desk to disconnect then connect then disconnect cables, ad infinitum. I can't go into the intricacies of it, only the horror. I have spoken with scores of incompetent people who each said something that contradicted the last advisor. I know how corporations work at a general level. Layer after layer of low level competence. Repetitions of rote apology. An opportunity to fill out a customer satisfaction survey. Somebody somewhere, a smart guy or gal, sitting in an office feeling sharp because s/he has hundreds who report to him/her, wearing a business suit and feeling important but wanting to feel more, has dropped the ball badly. In a smaller organization, there would be accountability and someone's ass would be handed to them as the smarmy business ones say. Maddening impotence on my end. I hate not being self-sufficient/self-dependent. But I couldn't fix this one on my own.

But I don't have time to write it now. Awful.

Here are two photographs by Luther Gerlach. He practices the dark arts that I am slouching toward, good ambrotypes and kallitypes. When I saw his work, I was impressed and wrote asking him if I might show a couple of his images, and he agreed. Go to his site and look around. Swell stuff, indeed.

Oh. In the end I got a month's free service. It is definitely not enough.

(Photo by Luther Gerlach)