Blogsizer The online journal and website of Tim Hulsizer

Let Your Children Be Stupid

We all get sold a bill of goods when we're children.  Our parents and teachers tell us to stay in school, study hard, and the world will be our oyster.  Just get smart, use your head, go to college.  Brains will open doors.  It isn't true.  You know what being smart has done for me?  It made me curious.  It made me inquisitive.  It made me endlessly indecisive.  How can I possibly be expected to choose one career to do for 40 years?  Everything is interesting, everything is worth investigating.  I didn't want to do one thing so I tried to do everything.  I STILL try to do everything.  I work with animals.  I taught English.  I worked in a book store.  I worked in a music store.  Sometimes I paint, sometimes I draw, sometimes I make music, sometimes I write.  And all the time I had those voices in the back of my head.  The voices of parents, the voices of teachers, voices saying, "Do what you love and your career will happen.  You'll find your niche, you'll get where you need to be."

Well that didn't happen.  I saw innumerable friends and strangers start jobs, get married, have children.  They found equilibrium through the normality I scoffed at.  I'm not scoffing anymore.  I'm pushing forty with nothing to show for it.  No career, no money in the bank, no family of my own.  I rent a room in the house my two engaged friends own.  I make amateur stabs at amateur art and I write whiny blog entries.  Dreams?  Too many, I guess.  Maybe that was the pit I fell into.  If I'd been able to choose just one and focus on that alone, things might have been different.  But choosing just one wasn't possible and here we are.  The years don't ask you if it's alright for them to go, they just speed past without permission.

A good head on your shoulders doesn't get you where you need to be.  Drive gets you there.  A sharp focus on what career you want gets you to that career.  Motivation gets you moving in the right direction.  But you can't force drive, focus, or motivation where it doesn't exist.  I don't have it.  My mind doesn't work that way.  I think in a thousand directions at once.  I see every possibility, every shade of grey, every opportunity open to me and every opportunity missed.  I don't live in the past; I live in the past, present and future all at once and at all times.  And all the time I would have been better off being stupid.  Finish school, get a job, move through the ranks.  Make no mistake, a career will NOT make you happy in and of itself.  But it will give you money that gets you the freedom to do what makes you happy.  My father had a career that differed greatly from the painting hobby he loved.  He had a family and it didn't make him happy.  But he had money and he wasn't alone.

So if your kid isn't that smart or doesn't care about college, leave them be.  Don't encourage them to be "smart."   Don't tell them to explore their options.  They just might get lost out there in the wide, wide world.  Sometimes there's no coming back.

Businesses Where I Live: Somewhere Good & Somewhere Bad

I got my computer back last night. It had stopped booting up two weeks ago so I just left it overnight with my local company of choice, Computer Solutions. They built the tower for me in the first place last year. The original install was XP running on a 2TB internal HD. A month ago I had them install a newer 3TB drive with Windows 7 and we made the old 2TB into a slave drive for backing up my oh-so-precious files. Hell, some of my music and image files date back to the 1990s. Most of my digital life is on there.

Where was I? Ah yes, last night. I love Computer Solutions because they always treat me like I know something about computers, even though I don't. And they never rip me off. In this case they were able to get it booting up with minimal effort so they only charged me a half hour of labor, when they could have charged me an hour because how they hell do I know how long it took them?

I took it home, turned it on, and immediately knew something was amiss. It was booting up alright but it was running the old XP from the old drive, and the new drive was nowhere to be seen. I immediately drove the 5 minutes back to the store, intending to leave it overnight again, but then their patented Awesomeness kicked in: the guy at the counter said, "Hang on a few minutes and let me take a look."

He took it in the back, hooked it up, and immediately saw what the repair tech had done wrong. Unaware of the newer drive, they'd just seen the old XP install sticker on the back of the tower and assumed that was the default. He also identified the real problem I was having, which turned out to be the computer having the wrong boot order. Somehow it was telling itself to start up XP from the old drive, then use that as a platform to start Windows 7 from the newer drive. Simple fix, which he did.

Then as if that wasn't cool enough, he listened to me moan about my current problem with a Google Redirect Virus. It's not terribly destructive to most systems but it burrows into the root kit and is notoriously tough to fight if you're an uneducated dolt like me. He grabbed a flash drive, started the PC in safe mode, ran a couple programs from the flash, and took care of the virus in five minutes or less. No charge.

With a great place like that in town, somebody has to pick up the slack and be a piece of crap to its customers. That honor continues to go to TD Bank. I know, I know...they aren''t local, they're a huge banking chain. But they've been a piece of suck for years before TD bought out the previous bank name, which in turn was the 5th or 6th name this bank has had in 20 years.

Their big problem used to be a 35 dollar overdraft fee charged per transaction. If you thought you had money in your account but somehow did your math a dollar wrong and you were in the negative, it didn't matter if you only made three 99-cent transactions. Each of those would be charged 35 dollars, meaning you weren't $2.97 in the red, you were $107.97 in the red.

The government passed legislation last year that banned that particular sleazy practice, but now they've gone into the fine print and figured out that they can legally charge you for having less than $100 in your account. If you do, you'll get a 15 dollar charge at least once per month. As if having Regis Philbin and his co-host Kelly Ripa as their "celebrity" spokespeople wasn't insulting enough?

I've been grumbling for years but it's time to change banks pronto.