Down in the boondocks
August 30, 2002
Isnt that also the title of a popular song, of about 40 years ago?
Well, anyway I have a neighbor who likes to play euchre, and hes pretty good.
But its pretty hard to find enough people to populate a euchre table here in south
central Kentucky.
But my neighbor has a telephone, and a computer.
And I advised him that for about $40 he could get a pretty good 56K modem, and that then for
about $20 a month he could play euchre on line!
And he did, and he did (and he did).
He linked up to Playsite, and Playlink, and Pogo, and Yahoo! (and even MSN)!
But he didnt like Playsite because every time he found players he liked, he was shunted
to another table.
And he didnt like Playlink
because there was no one there.
He liked Pogo,
but he found that it took him an average (he is a mathematician, and he took notes) of
22.79 minutes to log into a game on Pogo.
And he didnt fool long with MSN because, he soon realized, it was a venue for engineers
who had the skills to negotiate connections with esoteric web sites, not for theoretical
scientists like himself.
So, he settled into
Yahoo!
Not because he liked it,
particularly (he commented that the graphics reminded him of his old Commodore 64), or because
he liked the players there (he said that, actually, he found them rather rude, not to mention
stupid), but because it took him only a minute or two to join a game.
And then something happened.
It took longer.
And longer.
And he found himself being electronically booted (i.e., fried,
Yahooed, you know what I mean), several times a day (if he played
several games a day), and more often, and more often.
And there was nothing the poor fellow could do.
He couldnt move to Indiana:
He has lived
here all his life (his parents were Hoosiers, and it was from them that he got his appetite
for euchre; but he has roots and a family and a job here).
And he has a dial up connection.
He
lives a mile from town, and there is no television cable service, and will not be in this
new century.
Maybe he could hook up by
satellite, but the technology is yet in its infancy; and it costs $600 for installation
and $100 a month.
So:
He had either to move to Indiana, or quit playing euchre.
He quit playing euchre.
And, being a scientist, he figured it out:
As
the games sites on line got fancier and fancier (and shlicker and shlicker),
they required more and more memory.
My
neighbors own computer, which had 90 meg of RAM, crashed again and again, and even
worse (you can always get more RAM) his ISP (that stands for Internet Service
Provider, ha! ha! what an oxymoron!) quit supporting his connection (after all, it was
dial up; and the telephone number to dial up was in the next county,
25 miles away, through thicket and thunderstorm; and they have not learned yet how to maintain
the connection, despite fiberoptic cable and the fact that they turned on the
lights in the country more than 70 years ago through Franklin D. Roosevelts
Rural Electrification Administration.
Not to
mention any names, but lets call my neighbors ISP Sprint/Earthlink).
Actually, Yahoo! did not get shlicker and shlicker; but it did
get advertisier and advertisier, and slower and slower, and stickier and stickier.
So, same thing.
By the way, have you ever
noticed that Yahoo! is slower than Windows 3.0 at accessing messages?
I gave my colleague Gerry Blue, webmaster of the Yahoo! group Euchre Science, a look at
the above; and he wrote back:
Yahoo! is an . . . interesting story.
It reminds me of a shocking realization I was introduced to in high school.
A teacher said, TV exists to advertise.
That
may not be why it was invented, but thats why it exists today.
They just create shows that entertain because nobody would watch a 24-hour commercial.
Entertaining is something they have to do in order to get you to watch their commercials.
Yahoo! is the same way.
They advertise.
Thats how they make their money.
Providing
services is something they have to do so they can force feed you the ads.
Their advertisers get great service, and we get enough to keep us coming back.
Good point.
My neighbor quit watching
commercial TV, too; he just couldnt stand the ever numerous and ever lengthening
commercials.
For him it became either public
television or no television.
And he doesnt
watch even public television during Pledge Week (and, of course, thats
when they air their best shows).
He does
contribute.
And my neighbor who, like me, is in his 60s, and has been around a while, and seen
some stuff got to remembering, and thinking.
He remembered the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when they closed the country
schools not for desegregation, but for consolidation.
The idea was, a big school could provide better service than a small school.
Ha, ha!
Tell it to Chicago, and Washington, and
New York and Los Angeles.
And he remembered the 1970s and 1980s, when the banks and the Farmers Home
Administration closed the small farms, on the same principle that bigger is
better.
And he remembered the late 1980s and the early 1990s, when the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) closed the filling stations in the country (and he remembered a
summer day in 1994, with temperature at 94 degrees Fahrenheit, when he ran out of gasoline
only 20 miles from Cincinnati, and could not find a pump at any price).
And he remembered the later 1990s and the early 2000s, when all the little post
offices were closed.
No more Nick, Ky.,
no more Ollie, Ky.; no more Sunfish, Ky.; no more Bumfukt, Ind.;
you had to drive to Brownstown just to buy a stamp.
And quaint and picturesque postmarks were a thing of the past.
And then came the bread monopoly; and his favorite country store had to close because its
main profits came from sandwiches, and the bread distributor had decided that catering to
the Mom & Pop stores in the country was not profitable; and, while someone in the government
gave a damn about what Microsoft was doing to Dell and Hewlett-Packard, no one gave a damn
about what Sara Lee was doing to Mom and Pop.
And now and now who gave a damn about whether country bumpkins could stay
connected to the internet in the Information Age?
Back to the rotten boroughs.
They got cable.
Gerry Blue added:
And along came Barnes & Noble,
and the rest of the story is as predictable as Sprint
snipping the lines to areas that constantly lose money.
If an executive at Sprint were to ask me why he should continue to provide service to a
money losing community, Im not sure I could give him a convincing answer.
I hate it, but Im hard pressed to fault the business logic.
By the way, I dont think I learned anything about euchre in this column, but I
decided that the Euchre Hall of Fame should be built in Bumfukt, Ind.!
Natty Bumppo, author,
The Columbus Book of
Euchre
Borf Books
http://www.borfents.com
Box 413
Brownsville KY 42210
(270) 597-2187
[copyright 2002]
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