Application to play Sysiphus

Editors Note: Trying a new thing. All instances of swear words have been replaced with other words. The author is woefully unaware of our trick. Let us know if you it.

I don't know how many of you are on the hunt for a job. I'll say I am, but the truth is I am half-heartedly engaged in the process. It's not that I don't want to work, it's just that I don't really want a job.  If I, or anyone, is required to perform such a job, perhaps there should be some recompense in less hours?  I mean, robots can do our work anyway. 

Recently I got the chance to speak to my friend Linda, who is about my fathers age, about work. Labor. Her generation, and therefore my fathers, prided themselves on work. A good job, in a factory, marked your status in the community.

Even Norman Rockwell would find this quaint. A modern jaded hipster would find this the worst, hopeless conceit of a poor imagination. Not because we are afraid of work, but because the stable jobs are all low-wage unlivable jobs or high-stress paperwork jobs. Go on, read about the twenty hours staring at excel.

The truth is, the economy is sideways. The black-and-white Calvinistic, Austrian model of economics hasn't just been turned on it's ear, it's been kidnapped, gagged, and forced to inform people by the use of hoots, grunts, and interpretive dance.

Face it, the rules that applied back then simply don't anymore. Not in any meaningful way. Our parents, leaders, and corporate elite  haven't informed us that the rules have changed. Partially from ignorance.   But also, out of malice.

Job applications have certainly not changed for the better. They are, in all honestly, a hopeless  bureaucracy,designed to inhibit, deter and prevent you from getting a job.

In my father's day, you could walk in, ask for a job, and get one, or told to get lost. And, if so rebuffed,  you'd head down one door.  "Hitting the pavement" was the euphemism for what you actually did.   Now you apply on  for Internet websites, press submit. Answer 400 questions about your personality. And though there are no right answers, clearly I answer them wrong because I never get a call back. i just send my application into the either.

And call on an application? They don't really do that anymore. They will call you.

Sure they will. 

The worst so far, Qdoba. Do you really need to ask 300 questions. I go to Qdoba frequently, and the biggest question I have is: Can you find someone who can actually roll a borking burrito? fire the people who make those long personality tests, use that money to bus your burrito rollers to La Bamba for a day.

McDonald's was only slightly less aggravating. They ask a series of questions and you choose the question that most reflects your views. These are the same questions.  For example

"I am a hard worker" vs "I like to watch butterflies fly into my bosses nose." 

"OK" I clicked the former - though my boss has nose hairs you could land Apache gunships on.

"I am a lazy good-for-nothing slacker"  vs  "I eat baby dolphins because I hate life."

So now what?  Do I contradict myself or do I make Jack-the-ripper look like a children's educator?
Sure, it's a bit of hyperbole, but it still aggravates me. What does any of this have to do with pressing burgers and dropping fries in hot oil? 

I'll tell you what, I ain't no slacker. Baby dolphins be damned. 



Sparkfire kindly posted this  graphic. I know it's bogus  when it talks about farmers. "No Job Hunt. No Career improvement."


Nonsense. Farmer is one of the most important jobs. The plight of the farmer was not one of improvement, it was about the poor economic and political policies. Yes, being a feudal serf might have sucked. But barring disaster, a skilled farmer lived quite a good life in the US.

And besides, in this hyper-corporate project-based, intern-serfdom world. Maybe a stable job with consistent pay is just the thing we need. 

I tell you Zach Weiner is positively prophetic. I suspect he has a lot of Millennial friends less-than-employed. 

We are reaching the existential crisis of the Job Market.  On one hand, we have a a bunch of slack-jawed sociopaths babbling about "returns on investments", "10 percent improvement in process efficacy" and "item action productivity", on the other, we have an overabundance labor jobs (replaced by automation) and service jobs "not meant to be a living wage." On the third, yes, third hand, we have an ever-swelling, leviathan-like government bureaucracy that exists to leech off the low- and moderately-waged and make serfs of those at the bottom. And the fourth hand we have people who, by virtue of illness, disability, or plain orn'riness, refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense.

Yes, the current job market is basically a 4-armed tentacled monster. In my nightmares it has Newt Gingrich and Barack Obama's face, melded like a sick love child.

And it's not like the basic rules have changed. So why the horse and pony show? 

The massive tentacled beast destroying or economic possibilities does have some vestigial arms - farmers (often automated), medical technicians (rapidly becoming educated button mashers), the arts. Things that were, or are, still valued for producing. But the system doesn't like those arms. Bankers making money on bailouts hate to hear that maybe the guy that grows pumpkins is doing more for the country. At least the farmer isn't giving money to people who hate the US. 

At least you can become a plumber or tradesman, with years of schooling and byzantine apprenticeships.

The markets are being made to keep people out.

But that's another blog post (or two, if I talk about neo-cottage revolutions). I'm losing my point today. Forgive me.

If you are, or were, looking for a job in an old way, you are right-borked. Unless you know somebody. And I am not even kidding. 

That McDonald's job? I have applied at McDonald's before. That specific McDonald's, for a soul-sucking mcjob that I can work around my desire to not actually do that job. Something that lets me pretend that I will be an artist some day.

They have ignored my application, but a caseworker of mine works with  and knows the manager there. And he says he will hook me up.

Networking required for a "not a livable wage" job. This is madness. Absolute madness. Regulation and litigation have made companies terrified of just giving a job.

If I weren't already a little on the batshit side, this would be enough to make me so. 

If you can't talk to people and hob knob, you might as well enjoy mopping floors. It's not like starting a business is much an option. Even in the blog post above, he needed way more money than he new. if you are in poverty, how are you going to manage that?

Remember when we were told to get a good job and not to be an artist? Remember that? I sure as hell do.

That was before Patreon and Kickstarter made fools of all of us, except the damn fools that followed their dreams. It's a new world, and prescient as I might have been, I was sure dumb on that account.  

The Comcast Effect.

I seem, very much, to be in a tizzy over the economy - specifically how we work, why we work, and what we work on. I think the whole system, created by industrialization, has turned like some modern-day ouroboros, onto itself. The mechanization and industrialization has ran away with regulations (and de-regulations) all in the wrong places. It's left the free market, good work, and the lower-class gasping in the dust.

As for the middle class, our current legislative body, from fed to state, and often local, stabbed it in 2002, it just took this long for it to bleed out. The middle class barely had tiem to gasp "Et tu?"

The ever-increasing hatred of Comcast is a bandwagon that has perhaps circle. Recordings and interviews  making the rounds, showing us the madness of the Comcast system. And regardless of claims to the otherwise, Comcast knows about and encourages it.
In fact, I feel like translating the Comcast apology:

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and Ms. Belmont and are contacting them to personally apologize.

 Translation: We are so busted. This is just like when mom caught me stealing as a child. I had to go, apologize, and promise to pay back the shopkeeper. So now we have to apologize even though the candy we stole was delicious. Lame 

 The way in which our representative communicated with them is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives.

Translation: We do not precisely train our CSRs like this. In fact, it's not until they get on the call center floor where we discreetly discuss metrics. We reinforce these metrics at their 30- and 60-day reviewt

We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. 

Translation:   So, we know what's up and we will handle it in-house by completely ignoring it and.or firing the employee. 

While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

 Translation: This happens all the time, but we will add an extra ten minutes in training to discuss how much we care about our customers so we can update the published date on our training materisl. We'll make it look like an overhaul by paying people way more money than they ought to rewrite the language of our training materials.

(As a mercenary who doesn't have apersonal beef with Comcast, I'd like to say to them: I am up to the rewrite job, and my fees are reasonable. It's will be $10,000 a month. You can bundle that with my $5000  a month  consulting and my $3000 cartooning. Now separately you'd pay 18 grand for all that, but with introductory bundling, I can get you two for $9000 or all 3 for only $6000 for 6 months!  What a deal!)*

 Sometime in the past we gave up on the simple idea of good products and services. There used to be this process. You made a product or a service, then shared it and exchanged it for money. if the product and/or service was good, and you were reasonable, you would get returns and some profit. Industrialization was, supposedly, simply an extension. of this.

But something went sideways. We stopped looking at return customers and happy customers as signs of good work and started engineering opinions. We sent out surveys. And the surveys said things like 'the call was too long" or "they didn't fix the problem and I had to call again."  And we valued signing up new customers, at any cost. We added flow lists and databases and metrics because we thought the science and data backed it up. And it did, to a point. 

But we stopped offering service, and offering to do the jobs, and starting managing the customer. Not his expectations, but them. We forgot that all the data in the world isn't giving the customer what they want or need. 

The fact is, while it's true that no sane or honest business owner goes into the game to lose money, the profit - the bottom line, comes from relationships, and connections.

Rather than asking "What can we do to help the customer?' We ask: "Can we make the customer happy in 6 minutes." Then we ask "Can we finish the call in 6 minutes to help the next person, and can we make them wait in a queue."

I have discussed this before here.

Comcast is not alone. I worked for a small Telecom, TDS. I was a pretty solid employee,but I had a problem. I wanted customers to be helped. I want to solve their problem and make sure they didn't need to talk to me again.
Did some of the customers need multiple things? Yes. That, at first, didn't bother me. Did some customers ask me for things outside my scope of support? certainly - I explained that I could help, or couldn't. If I could help, I said other agents might not be able to help.

I had excellent customer service. But in the world of metrics and numbers, this was unacceptable. And the simple answer is because our managers were so divorced from the customer and the process that they couldn't even understand good customer service, and why their metrics were detrimental to the people on the floor. Customer Service Representatives breaking out in a sweat when the difficult call takes very long. raises lost to skewed averages and you miss a metric.  

All companies do this. Marco's Pizza did this. Measuring the time to make pizza, the time in the oven, the time on cut and time out the door. All of these do, in fact affect customer service. But, in the end, the only thing that really matters is the quality of the pizza and the good customer experience.  At Marco's Pizza, the management is not distant from the customer. If a customer is happy, metrics are loosened. If a customer is unhappy, no amount of metrics repair it.

Metrics tell very little about the customer experience. It is a game of testing boundaries - how much can we get away with in our search for profit and speed and still have a positive experience.

It seems insane. In order to give a "positive experience" I had to not do all the things that made an experience positive.

Now the same telecom sent all their tech jobs to uneducated Jamaicans, costing the US jobs and giving a worse customer experience.

Madness and bad customer experience in a search for profit. No company went out of business by building positive relationships.

Something has happened. Industrialization and profit-hunting have become metric chasing. Desperate attempts to show your job is relevant by explaining why your imaginary measurements are good measurements. That the science of profit, time management, and efficacy replaced the ability to craft a good customer experience.


*Comcast must sign a 12 month contract. After 6 months the introductory rate become $19,999 a month. Early termination fees apply.

My FCC comment.

 In light of net neutrality (I.E. Comcast F*cking the Internet), I conntected the FCC and commented thus:

"Simply put, the telecoms, all of which are thinly-veiled actual monopolies, cannot be trusted with the Internet. They use strong arm tactics and bullying, both on providers like Netflix, and on customers attempting to extricate them from the service. In no way can we trust them to ensure the fast lane/slow lane service will be priced fairly.

Our Internet lags behind many other countries, only because the monopolies - sorry - telecoms do not want to provide better service. They want to profit, and ignobly. "Get the mostest and offer the leastest." It would be comical if it weren't so true.

When we came to this country, a man or woman could make good in this country by simply carving out a part of the public land. The Internet is the new frontier, and technology the way to freedom. My giving this power to the telecomonopolies, you are denying the will to prosper of the United States.  New blogs, new stores, new industry using the logistics and the easy messaging of the Internet to make money, for themselves and for the government.

How many Internet business will we lose because access is only by slow lane? How many subscribers will quit Netflix and use libraries to get movies? The unintended costs of letting telecomonopolies introduce lanes will be staggering as it deincentivizes Internet use and Internet commerce. Economically it will be a disaster. Does that matter to you? the GDP used to matter, does it anymore? What happened to being a country of producers?

The media is woefully inadequate and untrustworthy. Pictures of George Zimmerman were lightened. His 911 call, manipulated. An informed public cannot trust television and radio sources.  Several news agencies have outright said they are biased, and one even won a lawsuit, claiming they didn't even have to tell truth. But on the Internet, where information is free, the truth can be found. And even if it requires digging through stacks of useless cat pictures and diatribes, I do it gladly to find out facts - something other media outlets often lacks.

By giving in to the telecomonopolies, you are taking steps to ensure that we cannot find any truth but the one most well liked by the corporations. What's next, a firewall to prevent us from knowing things outside Oceania? That would certainly prevent the spread of crimethink.

If an appeal to your nobler capitalist side side does not dissuade you, let me then try your more ignoble, despotic side.

Fast, inexpensive Internet is literally circuses. Imagine, if you will, a society of people who have access to cat pictures all day. With the incredible amount of slacktivism today, don't you think it would be wise to let people speak out on the Internet. They will spend their time lamenting with Facebook E-cards and never be so idle as to pick up protest placard and brick.

Open up the internet, and we will immerse ourselves in hedonistic voyeurism, and leave you alone. Close it down, and our idle hands will have to find something to do. Maybe rallying against a corrupt government is just the thing to get us off our Netflix-deprived couch-sitting asses."

I am not a lawyer, my language may be colloquial - I am a blogger and would-be demagogue. But if enough us remind them that the internet is useful, as a tool of information for us, or, at the very least, an easy leash for our masters - they may realize what a terrible idea Comcasts lanes will be.

Go here:  http://www.fcc.gov/comments and comment on 14-28

Jobs don't work.

Marco's update: Apparently my legend grows, even those who loathed me (except for the antagonist) say they miss me. I am touched by the sentiment, but sadly sentiment doesn't pay the rent(iment). I am still planning a crowd funding and to add a donation/buy stuff button as soon as I can figure out a product or service other than "miserably bad advice", "swear word portmanteaus", and "anti-corporate screeds."  Hell, I bet I could raise about 50 dollars just for the service of "shutting my mouth." 

I looked back at my work experience, and I have settled all previous jobs into two categories: "Useless Insanity" and "Unskilled Idiocy." I imagine that I am not the only person to categorize so, nor the first to realize the futility of work. My talent for miscreance, and the words of Michael Ventura, Alan Watts (or read the transcript) ,and Harlan Ellison have left me bereft of job morale.

Why, in that video by Alan Watts, he echoes my sentiment - or perhaps I echo his:

But if you do a job, if you do a job with the sole purpose of making money, you are absurd.

He suggests that when we do so, we begin to equate money with happiness. I can't argue, or won't, rather. I don't want utilize my talent for opposition today

My work has been as absurd as Alan Watts suggests. I was taught, rather harshly, that I must have a job. That my talents were not in fast food or factory, that I have a natural savant-like idiocy when it comes to schedules, rules, and policies. A trained monkey with a severe bleeding head injury can follow rules that I find as alien and incomprehensible as Martian mating rituals.

Actually, given my lewdness, I suspect extraterrestrial sex makes more sense to me. 

I was raised to work jobs. I had to have a job, according to my father. I don't blame my father completely. His father was raised on German work ethic and an industrial-revolution perspective of the world. My father would pull apart guns at age six and draw each part, then put them back together flawlessly. And when he performed this miracle, his father and mother told him that it was "nice" , but he ought get a job in a factory.

Lamentable. If a child showed such precociousness today, his parents would encourage him to study math and become an engineer.

My father said the same thing, like a mantra. You have to have a job. You have to have a job. You have to have a job.

And so I spent much of my time working as call center tech support, my stock and "trade". This trade constitutes being yelled at, screeched at, cried at,  for 40 hours a week, but for the blissful two hours a month when we were  droned at or yelled by our manager about our metrics.

No call center I worked for scored me on customer satisfaction. On the contrary, they scored me negatively if I spent the time to actually help the customer.   I was told at TDS Telecom that despite having more "Kudos" (compliments from customers) than other technicians, if I didn't lower my call times I would be fired.

Let that ruminate in your head. A kudos required extra work from the customer, and generally meant they were satisfied beyond mere resolution. TDS threatened to terminate me for helping customers. 


But that doesn't matter. What matters is call times. If your call takes longer than 6 minutes, you are doing your job wrong. Hang up on the customer - so long as they don't call back - and the managers are happy. Avoid helping the customer and - so long as the customer doesn't complain - call centers are happy. 

And if we are being honest, companies placed "First Call Resolution" as a metric only because agents hung up on customers to meet call length metrics.It's hard to fix someone's error in six minutes when you spend two of those minutes gathering required information and another two trying get them to find the start button.

Absurd, absurd, absurd.  Insanity. Put together unreasonable expectations and then get angry when people cannot meet them. That is the nature of corporate jobs.

I don't have a particularly good answer - I have some, but that will have to wait for another blog post.

If you want to read more, or see videos of these screeds, don't be afraid to subscribe, share on Facebook, on Twitter, or +1 on Google.


Marco's update part II: As I typed this, a  coworker texted me that the blow-job-enjoying manager told the antagonistic coworker to eat a bag of dicks as well. But he did it when they were punched out (and away from the eyes of corporate). Marco's me fired for breaking the illusion of cog-like perfection and order Frank -er, my manager, had cultivated. 
Don't send them hate mail. Send me 5 dollar donation I receive I will mail them a drawing of a bag of dicks. A dollar donation means I'll spent more than 30 seconds proofreading.Or, actually proofread.

Self-Soothing, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Learned to Love the Moment.

A lot of times people say you need to let go. Yesterday I finally understood it. I discovered something that helped me. Hopefully it will help others.

I am not a psychologist, a psychiatrist , or a psychic. But it struck me with a particular pop profundity.

Depression causes me to hold on tightly to negative experiences instead of positive ones.

Experiences are how we build self-identity. What we experience informs who we are. In self-soothing, we are asked to experience, in a positive way, a moment in our day.  We are to focus on the five senses. they say, for ease of remembering, this mnemonic: 5 sights, 4 sounds, 3 touches, 2 smells, 1 taste.

For example:

After my workout, I sat in McDonald's and watched a breeze play over a pink dogwood. The leaves rippled and swayed, I imagined, in an extemporaneous and improvised dance. As I watched, a woman leaned urgently over an envelope in a table to my left. She would carefully write in small letters, then look up at me tersely. Her arms warded off onlookers.
I sipped my ice water. Condensation collected on the outside in spite of the the air conditioning. I lifted the cup to my lips, and I was struck by how heavy and leaden it felt in my hands.My knee pressed into the half-wall near me. I felt grave. I moved my knee away and suddenly felt as if I might fly away. I turned and set it again to the wall.

In therapy we discussed some moments in our past that were pleasant. As we relived them, even the most unhappy of us smiled wistfully. It was then that the thought struck me that for the briefest instant that telling these stories, these details, made us seem like people without depression.  When "normies" talk, they share positive experiences. In sharing them they relive them. Most often they share humorous, happy, and pleasant stories. Let me emphasize: They are routinely connecting with levity.

I hold tightly to negative experiences and ignore positive ones. So my self-identity is made up of a remarkable number of sadness.
 And in pandering to this depression caused me to avoid positive experiences. I often suffered bouts of depression that kept me from engaging in and enjoying positive experiences. Parties, concerts, dinners with friends.

I see it a lot in my father. He will have a bad day if he has a single bad experience in a day. If I attempt to argue that his day went well, he will refuse to acknowledge it.

Depression is described as a black hole. I can't argue. i use positive emotions to try and fill that hole, but can't seem to. And while I won't discount biology (Well, I will for me), I will say that depression has trained me to connect with negativity. I feel intimately tied to it. It's cliche to say, but I wrapped myself in it.I gave unhappy moment s more gravity than they deserve.And I've spent years practicing this.

People without depression seem to have a much easier time letting go of  sadness. They have an easier time finding pleasant experiences that connect them to happiness. they, in fact, have a long history of practicing self-soothing.

Self-soothing is connecting with positive experiences. Pleasant experiences. As trite as it sounds, self-soothing trains people with depression to look on the bright side. Something we often dislike being told to do.

This module has convinced me further that dialectical behavioral therapy simply trains you to think and act like a normal person. 

All the world's a stage, yadda yadda yadda.

I love misfits. I admit it. I love people who just don't seem to fit. My favorite fiction, "'Repent Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman." is the story of a misfit. Everette C, Marm, who "wasn't much to begin with, except a man who had no sense of time."  In a world where being on time is the most important of values, he simply had no ability to do so. He couldn't fit in.

I wonder when he stopped trying? What day did he become the Harlequin?

I hero-worship misfits. I can't help it. All my heroes, all the stories I adore, are stories of misfits. Ellison, O'Conner, Butcher, Martin. I identify with them because I am a misfit. I can't keep my trap shut. I cannot be anything but what I am. I am a loudmouth, a snarker, and a clown.

I am not much to begin with, except a man who has no sense of propriety. And we live in a world that values decorum over morality. You can be a scumbag as long as you are polite about it. 

Yesterday during group therapy we read about activities to distract from emotional distress. The last line was "Sex; put a rubber band around your wrist, pull it out, and let it go."

Dear Kittens, when presented with something like this, what am I to do? When the universe gives you a gem like this, who am I say to no? Simon Peter spoke with the Holy Spirit to Jesus, right?

"Sounds exactly like my sex life."

Everybody laughed. I mean the kind of laughing, guffawing, and giggling that comes from releasing pent up energy. Therapy was derailed. Luckily, we neared the end of our session.  

The problem is twofold, my dear kittens. Chiefly, I am rewarded. When I mouth off I get laughter and I get likes and I get attention. Like a comic I get approbation from the audience. I have a reputation for being a funny guy. An amateur - very amateur -Patton Oswald. Which therein lies the second problem: I seem to believe I am always on stage - always entertaining. And it's not particularly exhausting to entertain all the time. But it is dangerous. Talking about telling someone to eat a bag of dicks is all well and good. And telling the story entertains - on stage or in a small group. And certainly all my coworkers were overjoyed that I told off the nagging bitchy shrew.

Seriously, she needed to eat a bag of dicks and shut her pieholster.  

But work is not a stage, and insults, however just and however warranted, are not tolerated in this "PC Bullshit" world. No matter how often we talked that way as a crew, no matter that a manager was blown by a subordinate and another manager sent dick pics to six subordinates without punishment until Marco's was threatened with a lawsuit.

So once again I find myself on the receiving end of a Pink Slip. I have a Kickstarter as soon as Amazon payments goes through.  We'll see what I can do from there. I've been on stage a long time, maybe it's time to pass the hat.  

Adventures of a Middle Class Mobo

Hello Again!

My plan was to write more often. I have not. Dear readers, I have done you a disservice. I throw myself upon my lappy! I prostrate myself for your forgiveness.

Or perhaps I just sip my large black coffee.

I have pushed my other projects back to tell you about my latest adventure. I am excited to say that I am a Mobile Hobo, or "Mobo". I confess that i do love that term. I cannot claim credit for it's invention. My friend Don told me it. No idea where he got it.

A Mobile hobo is a hobo who has a car. If we want to get pedantic, a hobo is a wandering worker, car or no. I am actually living the life of a tramp or a bum. Unfortunately, trying to combine "mobile" with tramp or bum makes me sound like a demented octogenarian tapioca junkie. M'tramp. M'bumramp. Tramampum...Mobum.

Trump? No. That would imply I have money to not look like a hobo, but still choose to for reasons of toupee.

Speaking of dressing up. My friend Jes (read her blog here) is a master fashionista.  She knows her stuff, and is a master deal finder. Want to look good on the cheap. She can help. She says I would look good in Taupe. I trust her. However, I find the name incredibly vulgar.

Taupe. Say it. Taupe.

So when I lose these last "few" (80) clinging pounds, I shall get something Taupe.

Back to the topic. I am a bum, at least temporarily. I shall go into my justifications in future blog posts, but for the time being I want to give a few first impressions.

1) Early to bed and early to rise, more or less.
I worked out hard yesterday.  I walked for an hour, then I did the Arc trainer, then I lifted. I was beat to hell. But I started at 10:30 pm and finished my post-workout shower around 2. Getting to bed that late normally isn't a problem. It usually takes me about a half an hour for me to get to sleep, more in the car. Suddenly it's 5:30 am and light's shining in. I don't want to get too much sun..So that means moving indoors. I got 3 hours of sleep last night.
I'm a little hinky

2) Walmart becomes your friend.
I slept in the parking lot of a local Walmart. The advantage of Walmart is the parking lot is huge. There are plenty of empty spaces to park in. You look exactly like any of the drones working. One person parked right next to me. they either didn't see me or didn't care. And more importantly, when morning comes you can head into the bathroom quickly and take care of business.

3) Kill the lights and put it in neutral...well..park, actually.
These are what will get to you. The lamps in a lot are pretty bright. This discourages crime, but makes sleeping difficult. I solved this by hanging blankets as makeshift curtains. It has the added effect of obscuring me from the curious.   Always hit the parking break

4) Internets
We cannot, in this day and age, live without our Cheezeburger Cats. Here is my cursory exploration of local internets.

Starbucks:  Internet Speed is good, but it's costly to sit there (about 3 bucks a day). Second best hours (6am to 10pm) and if you go late at night they sometimes give you food they would otherwise throw away.

McD's:   Where I write this. Only a dollar for a soda pop or a coffee. Sit all day. Longest hours (5:30 until Midnight). Internet is woefully slow. Especially if some douche-canoe is HOGGING ALL THE BANDWIDTH. I'M LOOKING AT YOU, KID WITH THE HEADPHONES! QUIT YOUR YOUTUBINATING AND STOP CLOGGING MY WEBPIPE!

Library: Shortest Hours (10am to 5pm). Comparable to Starbucks. Cheapest (FREE).

Any other locations that you know of? Send me a line.

5) It's not so bad.
As long as you have a moderate size car, you can sleep pretty well. I have to sleep sitting up - mostly because I normally sleep on my stomach, and until I get a van, that's not an option. So I just sit up on a bank of pillows and stretch my legs out. But it's cozy and so far I am lucky to have cool evenings, few insects, and zero . We shall see if this continues.

Well, that's it so far. If you liek this, then like it, or follow me. In the future I shall discuss other strategies for going "off grid". Most notably food and income.  How do you maintain a diet? Can you live on canned beans alone? Gluten free and Vegan options?

Also, I added to the list of books here