Monday, November 21, 2011

Pavlov's Dog Eats Spam

Writing is one of those personal things.  Some can do it in a crowded auditorium with people watching over their shoulder and commenting about their use of language.  I should know, I used to do that to Mike when he was working for the local paper in the Wilton Manors City Hall Commission Chamber.

Bad Rambling Moose.  Bad.

Others may need utter silence.  The kind of silence that you wish you could get in a library, but since society has degraded into this interconnected thing that has chimes and beeps and other electronic noises going off at random moments because of Oooh I Just Got A Text And Let Me Drop All To Answer It ...

Where was I?

You get the picture. 

In my case, I'm sitting here enjoying the relative silence of this house.  The Dog Snores. The Parrot is making a mess on the tiles that I cleaned yesterday by eating and sending technicolored fruit flavored bits while eating.  Two clocks tick loudly.  The ceiling fan whispers above.  The Classical Music is softly playing.

Over all of that my ears are ringing but that is a normal thing with me.

Write a paragraph and BONG! someone had written to my Professional Email account.

A quick look at the watch and I see that it is 9AM and it's time for the first of many BONG! Email Spams that I am actually set to receive BONG! through the day.

We used to consider web surfing an amazing thing, and in reality it is when you try to wrap your head around it.  The amazing breadth of the internet means that you are lost in a maze that you may be able to explore, try to cover, but never will completely see.  There are walls that block you but the sheer vastness will stop you from seeing it all.  I watched a British Comedy once where a Superhero came to Earth and lived in a small flat in a small town in the Western Suburbs of London.  It was a comic element where the hero went and surfed the internet.   All of it.   The keyboard had melted with smoke and the monitor was beginning to glow red but he had done it all.

Fantasy, there's just no way you can see it all.

So we have begun to opt into web sites and get emails from them with an extract of what is interesting in the day.  I run one of those email sites as part of my duties with Wilton Manors Main Street so I do know that there are some folks that do care about the quality of the information delivered.

Ours is a monthly letter, when we can get all the organizations together and have the thing assembled. 

Others are much more BONG! regular.  There are quite a few that I subscribe to to keep up with the technical details of a career in Project Management.  Literally I can set my watch to the BONG!s that I get in the course of a day.  During the time it took me to write this blather, I have gotten three BONG!s.

That BONG! won't smoke my laptop, but it will give me something to occupy myself with later. 

It's something like the experiment where Pavlov trained his dog to drool when it heard a certain bell.  In my case, I run for the laptop when I hear the BONG! just like that dog.

Maybe not Run, but it does give me a moment to pause.  After all, you never know what's BONG! happening out there!

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