Garbage-in, Garbage-out

“Grady,” asked my friend Marcy. (“Grady” was my nickname at the Mighty Mezz — see blurb at right.) “Marcy” worked in the cubical next to mine; she in her late 20s or early 30s, me in my early 60s.
“I wanna know how you dredge up so much insanity to blog?” she asked.
“Marcy, it’s everywhere!” I exclaimed.
Sometimes I worry about running out of blog topics. This has been especially true since -a) my beloved dog died, and -b) I cut back to blogging only my own calendar.
I tried to walk that silly dog as much as I could. And at first I was blogging all my seven calendars. (Before you question my sanity, only one calendar is used as an actual calendar. My calendars are wall-art that changes monthly.)
Blogging seven calendars gobbled a lotta time. Mowing got shoved aside, and laundry went undone. A giant stack of cardboard sits in my garage awaiting chop-up for recycling.
So I cut back to blogging only my four train-calendars. (I’m a railfan.) But even that gobbled time, and wasn’t getting many readers. I e-mail blog-links to maybe 32 people, and usually get 10-15 readers per blog. Often more. My Monthly Train-Calendar Reports were only getting 5-6 readers. Many of my readers aren’t interested in trains.
I do a calendar of pictures my brother and I took near Altoona, PA, where the old Pennsylvania Railroad crossed Allegheny Mountain. That railroad is no longer Pennsy; it’s now Norfolk Southern. But it’s still very busy — that railroad is a main trading conduit between the east-coast megalopolis and our nation’s interior. (The other is CSX across NY.)
What I usually say is “wait 15-25 minutes and a train comes” — often more frequent than that. Trains are so frequent ya might see two or three at once. Much of Allegheny Mountain is three-track railroad; two tracks approaching, and at one location there are four tracks.
Allegheny Mountain is also a challenge. It’s a 1,016 foot rise in elevation. Helper locomotives are often needed to conquer it. Summit is at 2,194 feet.
My brother and I get fabulous photographs there. I plug ‘em into a calendar made by Shutterfly. I send ‘em as Christmas presents, and they also give me plenty to do.
I never watch TV. What I do is -a) take and process photos for my own calendar, -b) make the calendar via Shutterfly, and also -c) “sling words.” (What I call writing.)
Every morning as I sit down for breakfast, my pencil comes out, I engage my legal-pad, and I start “slingin’ words.” I never can get my muse to shaddup!
Mostly there’s some recent insanity to blog — I depend on it. “Marcy, it’s everywhere!”
The other day it was my iPhone. It has a calendar thingy I update so I can schedule appointments away from my home calendar. —Like at a doctor’s office.
iPhone’s calendar-app isn’t challenging, but the other day was a hairball.
I had to crank in a doctor-appointment, and after I did, that appointment wasn’t in my iPhone calendar. Actually it was, but the calendar-month wasn’t showing me. Not that way.
Finally after three tries I gave up! All I did was write down the appointment on my wall-calendar.
What was I doing wrong? Nothing I saw. Perhaps the calendar-app was not programmed right. Not the first time.
“Garbage-in, garbage out:” words I gleaned long ago from an old RTS bus-driver whose son programmed computers.
Do I really wanna let computers drive my car? That’s what I said after this iPhone hairball. They’re gonna hafta pry my cold dead fingers off the steering-wheel. NO WAY am I gonna let my car self-drive 70 mph bumper-to-bumper.
As a retired transit bus-driver I want slop — that is, five or six times the usual braking distance to avoid slamming on the brakes. Brake hard and ya toss passengers onto the floor.
I suppose I’m no longer driving bus, but I can’t dump old habits. I still drive “professionally,” and thereby anger others.
My guess is some hoity-toity ‘pyooter engineer inadvertently blew it. On viewing another way, that doctor-appointment was there the three times I entered it. But it still wasn’t in my iPhone’s calendar-month as first viewed.
Garbage-in, garbage-out!
I hear horror-stories from fellow ‘pyooter-users about the various “fixes” and “patches” for programming hairballs. My opinion is someone mucked up programming the calendar-app for my iPhone.
I’m told Apple’s recent “High Sierra” operating-system is a disaster. It was floated way too early; it hangs and locks up.
Memories of Windoze-95. We had it on a PC at the Mighty Mezz, and had to pull the plug to shut it off.
Oh well, I’m only cranking an appointment into my iPhone — no big deal. And it’s in there but not viewable the first way I tried to find it, which is the way I try to find it at a doctor’s office.
‘Pyooter-guru at the Mighty Mezz would just laugh and say “it’s in there, ain’t it?” As if we should value insanity.
Well pardon-me for trying to avoid madness. Am I supposed to look at things a second way to avoid first-way craziness? If someone mucked up, and is thereby driving me up-the-wall, I’m supposed to just chuckle?

• “Marcy” is my number-one Ne’er-do-Well — she was the first I was e-mailing stuff to. A picture of her is in the following blog: Conclave of Ne’er-do-Wells. —That blog was written years ago, so -a) is not a good as recently, and -b) Marcy has since married and moved to Los Angeles.
• “RTS” equals Regional Transit Service, the public transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). My stroke October 26th, 1993 ended that. I retired on medical-disability. I recovered fairly well.
• The “Mighty Mezz” is the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, from where I retired over 11 years ago. Best job I ever had — I was employed there almost 10 years —  worked there over 11 if you count my time as a post-stroke unpaid intern.