Stick with Me. I'll make a point eventually.
Sometimes you write in your diary, and sometimes you write and interesting
things happen as a result and you can get a sense of what these things can
really do.
I wrote the racism rant yesterday because, as you might have been able to
tell, I was angry. When you write something like that, you never know who might
be reading it that is totally offended by it, because even though there are
relatively few people in right-out-front society today who will court a racist
reputation (my boss apparently being one of the few in that minority), there are
probably loads of people who, in the privacy of their own homes, have different
feelings. Just because anti-racism was a strong theme in my parents' home, it
doesn't mean it was, or had to be, in anyone else's. We didn't go to church or
synagogue, or emphasize any of that kind of value system, as many other people
do. Six of one.
So I enjoyed hearing from mel and reading her entry, as her upbringing was
somewhat similar to mine and it looks like it was on this thing, too. But then I
read this one from allegedwife. It looks like things are very different on the
other side of the world in Australia. You should definitely read this one.
Because you can. Because she and I are about the same age, have just-grown
kids, live in suburbs, and both keep diaries online and so now I know that she
exists and she knows that I exist and you know, too. Because I'm in New Jersey
and this is how I feel about something that's important to me and she's in
Australia and this is how she feels about the EXACT SAME THING and now we both
KNOW. It's a remarkable world.
I've always had a certain level of anxiety when it comes to writing about
work here in the world of the diary. According to
CNN,
I've got good reason to. Sometimes I'll post something and mention that I wrote
it at work. But what that means is that I wrote it long-hand at work (euww ..
but yes, I can still do that), or in email to myself, but not that I posted it
online from work. I scrupulously avoid any contact with the big D-land from
school, whether it's to post to my own diary or read anyone else's. My d-land
username has never ... NEVAH! been typed into this humble keyboard in school.
(Yes, I'm typing this in school on Thursday morning. I was inspired by the
diaries I read while I was eating breakfast and I made notes on an index card
and now here I am.)
Anyway. I know from other diaries I read that people sometimes read/post from
work, and I assume they do so after having given thought to their particular
situations and network environments. The last thing I would worry about is that
I would be "caught" goofing off, because generally there is not a living soul
who comes around behind my desk and sees what's up on the screen unless I ask
them to. (I seem to have broken the SCM of that nasty little habit.) What we've got here is a networked school district where each
individual must be logged onto the computer with a personal username/password just
to gets Windows up and running, let alone go to the Internet. Based on past
experience, I know that "they" at Computer Central can find out which websites
which login has gone to. But the other thing I know they can do is keep track of
all usernames and passwords that anyone enters, anywhere in the system. This may
not be super-public knowledge, but it's not a secret, either.
When the system was installed (in 1998) and then completely revised a few
years later, all students and staff members had to sign user agreements, which
is pretty standard practice. (I actually wrote the original agreement for
students.) Among the basic rules we all agree to are no games (a big one with
kids; we block their access for violating this one all the time), no chat or IM,
and so forth. AND NO FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS. For anyone. Kids can't buy anything
on eBay, and teachers can't do their online banking, or their Christmas
shopping, or whatever. I think the reasons for this in terms of wasting school
time and resources are pretty clear. But as the head guy at Computer Central has
told me, teachers are still doing this ALL THE TIME and as a result, he has
records of everybody's Amazon passwords and credit card numbers and bank account
numbers! He doesn't want this -- he's an honest guy -- and doesn't look at it,
but he knows that the system structure just creates these logs and that they're
there and no amount of his telling people to stop doing this is making them
stop, even when he tells them about the logs.
So my question, then, is how careful have I been? The only thing I log into
at school is one email account, which is not all that secret, and sometimes my
Blockbuster queue, and that online class I'm taking. I use Amazon all day long
(to check for books in print, etc., for work) but not logged in; if I need to
order a book for the library I do it from home and get reimbursed from petty
cash. But is that careful enough?
I use pseudonyms for everyone, and as we know, I work here faithfully at
Bizarro World High School. I suppose that if someone who knows me or the school
happened to come across my diary, my exact location and identity could be
deduced, and pretty easily. That's unsettling. On the other hand, I am expressing only my own
opinions about what goes on here, and I'm not exactly revealing company secrets.
Even the most current Scandal of the Week was hardly a secret; it was, after
all, something said in a very large room that was filled with people. Yet I am
suffused with that false sense of security Internet anonymity provides. This may
be real, it may very well be not real. Certainly I have read people's diaries
who have been outed in one way or another. I like to hope that if such a thing
ever happens to me, the people who read it will mostly just think the stuff I
write is funny. The Psycho, I think, would have a hard time denying any of it,
although she does seem to think that she's the bee's knees and is just a swell
person. She has an odd sense of self. But I haven't said anything that isn't
true. Mostly, I'd like the SCM not to find it because the stuff I've written
about him would hurt his feelings. But venting here keeps me from killing him,
so I think that all works out to the best, even to his best.
Part of last week's Scandal is that there suddenly appeared a website that
called itself "the underground newspaper" of Bizarro World High School. That's
where the staff meeting remarks broke to the general public, so somehow students
knew about it. At first there were some thoughts that a staff member was writing
the site, but then it became clear that it was kids. There was gossip there,
remarks about teachers they thought were crazy or just bad, and remarks about
kids too. And then on Monday, the site was gone. It was pulled by its host for
violation of the terms of the service agreement, one of which was not to engage
in defamation. Well, an interesting lesson learned for the budding journalists.
I hope they put it back up someplace else but do so this time with a whole lot
more forethought. It provided a valuable service.
Which leads me to wonder if my site is defamatory -- I hope not -- and if there's even a chance that it might be, is it in my interest to cast a wider net
looking for more readers? I can't be the only person in Bizarro Town with a
d-land account. Funny thing about the banners. None of the ones I'm running are
new; I've used these all before. I think what I never got about the banners is
that you have to run A LOT of them to get any response. So why did I run them
now? I was about to renew my SuperGold when I noticed that I had about 30,000
banner views still left, and I figured that I would lose them somehow when I
renewed, so I thought I'd use them up first. I submitted three old ones for 10,000 views
each and one more for the last 300 views, and okay, so this is how banners are
supposed to work! I've been getting some lovely notes and stuff, and a nice
response in general, and I'm going
to check all those new diaries out, too -- but not at work -- and I guess I'll just
keep my fingers crossed that none of you are running around in BTHS sweatshirts.
So didja see Lost last night, didja, huh? And then they said that some
of the cast members would be on Good Morning America this morning, so I
set the VCR for it and before I left the house I changed over to channel 7. Ten
lousy minutes I watched a different TV channel in the morning and I got all
messed up. It was like I stepped into a parallel universe. <whine> I don't know
this weather guy! What's he talking about? I can't understand him! What's that
picture on the map? </whine> (Can
you feel the OCD just creeping up on me?)
Speaking of changes in routine, here's the latest from the Hubs. He no longer
puts away the clean dishes in the drainboard. Not that he has too, particularly,
but he's been doing it for the last 27 years and I've gotten used to it. I
suppose it's another little passive-aggressive thing, and a harmless one, as
things go, but really. Couldn't he just say, "Hey, maybe one of you can put away
the dishes sometime?" (And I could say "Hey, maybe you could clean the bathtub
ONCE EVER or rinse out the kitchen sink after you use it ONCE EVER?" Probably
why he doesn't just tell me stuff, heh heh.)
I turned the heat off in the family room yesterday (an electric baseboard,
the rest of the house has gas/hot air) and opened the windows, prompting the
annual Struggle For Window Territory between Q and Boo. Q tried to assert
herself, but ended up falling off the piano instead. Boo claimed the window and
then Q took his favorite sleeping spot on the back of the couch, where she
stretched out to her full length and looked somewhat disturbingly like a
Botticelli with fur.
In the world of general information and how it is acquired, a subject which
has always fascinated me totally, I asked R if she was familiar with the
expression "golfwidow." She gave me one of those "Oh, mother" looks and said
that she was. She did, however, say that until about a month ago she had never
heard the expression "Monday morning quarterback" and didn't know what it meant
when she first heard it. Huh.
The two big things I'm noticing recently in the world of Lacking General
Information is that people do not seem to understand how to cross streets or
walk near others in public. Crossing streets properly was drilled into me as a
child by everyone from Captain Kangaroo to Miss Frances. Cross at the green, not
in between! Use the cross-walks! Look both ways! Now these idiots just step into
the road without a second thought and rely on you to slow down your two-ton
steel machine in four feet in four seconds. The new thing around here is that
people have those portable (so-to-speak) basketball hoops and they park them not
in their driveways but on the curb. So the kids are playing basketball in the
street, and how dare I drive my car on that road and get in their way? Some of
them aren't even on side streets. Yesterday a bunch of these dopes wouldn't even
stop playing, and kept shooting another ball or jumping back out into the road
for a rebound. I threw the car into park and sat there in the middle of the road
watching them until they all moved onto the sidewalk.
Then there's that thing how when I'm in a store and standing looking at
something, someone will just keep walking as if I'm freaking invisible, because
clearly she wants to stand just where I am and no place else will do, but
she doesn't make eye contact or say excuse me, she just keeps walking right at
me until I move. Hello? And then yesterday in ShopRite, which is the Mecca of
People Who Don't Understand the Concept of Personal Space, I would be looking at
a shelf for something, and people would push their carts up so they were
right between me and the shelf I was looking at and just stand there, starting
to scan the shelves as if I were invisible. This happened to me maybe
five times there yesterday alone. Oh crap, maybe I am invisible. That
would be annoying. Anyway, I did not resort yesterday to my favorite tactic,
which is to say loudly to one of these assholes "Oh, I'm SO SORRY that I was in
your way!" and then roll off down the aisle in a huff. I was too tired to huff
yesterday.
Really, I was carefully taught. Aside from the whole racism thing, I
was raised by people with manners. Thanks, Shirl. Thanks, Jack. Good job.
