The Downtown Arcade 8 - Computers Are My Forte Edition
Howdy friends! Welp, by my count it has been, uh, 19 months since I last updated you from my perch here at the Downtown Arcade. There have been great changes. Let's dig in.
As always, please reply back to this email if you want to say hi. And I'd love for you to say hi. How are you?
A while back I told you I left my job teaching and advising journalism at the local university. I added that I was getting back into the exciting world of freelance writing. I did sell some work, but urgh with the state of journalism these days. I mean woah. Did you hear about iconic media brand Sports Illustrated farming out content to robots? Oh no oh no.
When I started as a reporter in the early 2000s, journalists were, thanks to gigantic technological and business changes, starting to have to figure out the future of their profession in addition to doing the daily work of phone calls with crabby sources. Twenty years later, journalists are still inventing their future and trying to hang on. I salute those smart, hardworking people. Meanwhile, I was nearer the end of my working life than the beginning, and I didn't feel like doing that anymore.
So I took stock. I like computers. My first job out of college was in IT. Could I get back into IT?
I could, and I did. For a little more than a year I've been working in the IT department at the local hospital here in Natchitoches. Hardware, software, networks, phones, I do a little of everything. The job is always lively, my coworkers are hilarious, and I'm lucky to have landed a good position in our little town. There aren't a lot of great jobs here, and the prospect of working remote didn't thrill me.
I'm very grateful for a new beginning!
True story
If you, like me, have been reading the New York Times for 30 years, then for 30 years you have been aggravated by Metropolitan Diary. Every Sunday, the column gathers tales of New York City living contributed by people who are or were there -- celebrity encounters, meet-cutes, cigar-chomping cabbies, eloquent shopkeepers. Sometimes there is doggerel. I find it almost unbearable in its tweeness, and yet I read it week after week.
Recently I decided to take a stab at my own Metropolitan Diary entry. Here it is!
The Driver's Voice
Dear Diary:
It was a crisp fall morning in the year 3.9 billion B.C. I was an ambitious young bacterium riding a No. 31 crosstown bus. Suddenly, through the process of binary fission, I split into two separate organisms. The passengers near me burst into applause. Then came the driver's voice, loud and clear: "Very nice, Mac, but this bus don't move till I get another fare."
-- Kenneth R. Burns