Strange
Day

I wasn’t looking forward to yesterday’s protest very much. If you’ve read this far, you know mmy opinions of the annual World Bank/IMF protests. Barely pubescent weekend anarchists living out some delusional rite of passage.
“look how hard I am, man”
Yesterday’s protest didn’t get much buildup in the mainstream press. My only information came from some light pole banners and the anarchist web sites.
(The shit I read.)

Right from the start this was different.
I couldn’t tell you why, but at least outwardly, the police didn’t overreact. It may have something to do with the fact that the event was officially taking place on National Park property which mmeant it was under Park Police jurisdiction for a change. And I did notice the MetroPD Mobile Command vehicle parked near the State Department. But the gratuitous placement of foot patrols on the street was minimal, and I had no real trouble crossing in front of Lafayette Park.
Maybe the police figured the lack of press would keep the event small.
Yeah.
This was the single largest protest I have seen in the Capitol since moving here. In fact, the only events I remember with more and more vocal attendence were the Fourth of July foireworks on the Mall and maybe the Shrub’s innauguration. (That last one is questionable, since it was hard to see much with the terrible weather and the Secret Service lieing to the specttors about access.)
Two hundred thousand people, they’re claiming. Wouldn’t suprise me.
And they were different people.

They were all there. The surest sign of the limits of the IMF protests is the sheer homogony of the participants. But yesterday they were black and white. Asian. Hispanic. Middle Eastern. Old. Young. Babies. Handicapped. It first really hit me as I watched one protestor try to step off the curb. She must of been at least 85 years old. She could barely move on her own, and relied heavily on her cane. But there she was, with a pin in her coat which cast dubious aspersions on the Shrub’s parentage.
These weren’t angry people with puppets and vinager soaked bandanas. They were just your average people, visably from every walk of American life; ethnically, economically, religiously, agewise. There were spontaneous crowds of people dancing and singing. Several times Isw people facing Mecca on their knees to pray. (And not all of them were Muslim). Barring the few apparently unavoidable profiteers, these were people who all shared a common cause, and gathered together to raise their cries as one voice.

They were energized and orderly. They marched on the White House, and left in their wake, not broken windows, anarachy stickers, and spraypainted slogans, but crowds chanting for the disembodied sexual organs of the Shrub. Free people of every ilk coming together to express their hatred for the Ameriacan Resident and everything he has done. My God there are times I love America.

Lafayette Park behind the White House

Medical Center Metro Escalator

There are some people I will not understand.
Among them this day are Technical Support staff. This is a truly humbling admission since I am one of these people myself.
My consistent experience with people in these jobs leads me to believe they are all deaf. Any other explanation would require them all to be incredibly conceited.
Note: there is never a thing about computers I have not been able to teach myself. Somehow my piss poor parents sent me to computer classes on summer in the mid-80s. Since then, it has been non-stop poking and prodding, My first exposure to Macs was in high school where we did strange things to them that our teacher couldn’t figure out. In college, I taught myself HTML and Unix at a time when Lynx was the only real web browser. I remember telneting into a CD store years before Amazon.com ever existed. I maintain a $50,000 computer network as a part of my job.
There is nothing mysterious about computers. It always has been and always is a matter of understanding why a computer does one thing, and the rest progresses naturally.
But I mention none of these things when I call technical support. I try to defer to the ‘expert’. I state the facts ass I know them, hoping the Techie will interpret my data and provide me with a solution.
Not a chance.
The first step is to ignore every test I have ever done, and proceed to talk me through the most menial of possible tasks. Thirty minutes later when they’ve finished with the tests I spent five minutes completing 3 days before when the problem first appeared, they present me with the most insane of possible problems, and almost innevitably suggest wipeing out everything and starting from scratch,
These are boys reading from manuals. They wouldn’t dare skip ahead a few pages, for fear of their very slide-rules.
I have told no less than 10 companies about my problems with my computer’s hard drive. I point out the exhaustive series of tests I have performed, and the time I spent on the phone with the manufacturer of both the computer and operating system, who could not find any problem on their end. The hard drive is locked up in a world of its own and will surrender it’s secrets to no man.
And I always leave off by pointing out it appears as though a pin has broken off on the jack. Just a little metal stub left.
and ten companies or more have now told me, each one a different story, how it must be something else wrong with my hard drive.
look me in the fucking eyes. try to stay with me.
a
little
metal
pin
has
broken
off.
no I can’t test your hard drive because nothing can read the drive. and no i will not take it to a PC somewhere to get test results for you… thats what I’m fucking paying you for. And if one more of you fuckers feeds me a line about the high costs of CD burning for data recovery, I am going to shove the whole fucking drive somewhere uncomfortable for you, and maybe then you can count the pins.

National Building Museum at Judiciary Square

it’s a little different walk to work.

IMF Protest Artifacts