It’s been a little over two years since I nestled into a cozy little corner of the Internet to start up this oddly named and angry little blog, and most of the time has gone by in a flash. The beginning was rough, as beginnings often are, but with a little time and a whole lot of living, I eventually managed to ratchet down the fury and find a simpler pace. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I fell in love and started a family somewhere along the way, or that my frustrated little scribblings would start leading to bigger and better opportunities. And, while there are some things I still can’t talk about (things which I’ll leave to my creepy little cyberstalker to continue trying to ferret out, unsuccessfully), I can reveal one of them today: I stand on the precipice of a major career change.
I’ve never talked much about my day job before, mostly out of a desire to maintain some level of disconnect from my employer and this web site. However, since I run contrary to so many on the Internet and do not hide myself behind a cloud of anonymity, a simple Google search of my name will quickly identify my place of employment. Since 1994, I’ve worked in the Information Services department of the local school district in my mid-sized hometown Texas city. When I started way back in the year that saw the founding of Netscape, the inauguration of Nelson Mandela and the bizarre low-speed highway chase of a fleeing O.J. Simpson, I was a simple grunt nobody, working part-time as a college student. Eventually, I worked myself into a full time position and, as the Internet began growing into a viable communications tool, I launched the district’s first website. Since then, I’ve faithfully served as the district’s webmaster for the past decade and a half.
Sixteen years is a long time for anyone to work at the same place though, and I find that my head is filled with such an endless ocean of technobabble and industry jargon that it’s difficult to tell where the knowledge ends and I begin. As is evident from my previous essays here at Coquetting Tarradiddles, I am no great lover of technology – but I am also far from being a luddite. I have a sort of love/hate relationship with all of the fancy machines bleeping and blooping away in dark and cold server rooms scattered around the globe, regulating the flow of information and controlling our world. The technology behind it all is fascinating, but it’s the end result of all those hard drives whirring away behind the scenes of our lives that often leaves me scratching my head and wondering what’s the point? Using computers to teach students how to write, for example. Or the rise of stupidity on the Internet, where a good vocabulary is a luxury held in contempt by those without one. The inexplicable lack of people’s resistance to web-based ponzi scams – all these things make me question just how much better technology has actually made our lives, and how much of it is nothing more than smoke, mirrors and Silicon Snake Oil.
Public education has proven particularly susceptible to sipping technology’s electric Kool-Aid, and so shoves upon student after student the grim realities married to the fact that the powers-that-be just Don’t Get It. The fault does not lie entirely at the feet of the decision makers in the education system, of course. In fact, one could easily argue that they are merely bending to societal pressure when answering the misinformed cries of an ignorant public to ‘Put more computers in the classrooms!’ And so, with no one ever having bothered to learn from history, more computers are bought and with each passing year, more kids plug in, sign on and tune out. It’s Timothy Leary all over again, only this time with a laptop rather than a fistful of acid tabs.
The truth is that technology is a tool like any other, not some glorious end in and of itself. Teaching children ‘computer skills’ is far less important, I think, than teaching them critical thought or instilling into their impressionable young minds the simple and thrilling joys that come from independent study – but you’d never know that by walking into a modern classroom. It’s all PCs and SmartBoards and tech, tech, tech. Why? Why do we cater to the mercurial demands of an ever-changing technology base with which we can never hope to keep pace, let alone foresee and predict with any certainty? It’s almost as if the mere presence of technology in the classroom is enough to comfort the masses. ‘My kid has the Internet on his computers,’ the parents seem to say. ‘Everything will turn out alright. Technology will keep us competitive!’
To this, I respond by reworking a Hunter Thompson quote, taken from Part Two, Chapter Eleven of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:
Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks techno geeks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit a computer and an Internet connection. But their failure is ours, too.
What Leary Gates, Jobs, Wozniack, et al. took down with him them was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he they helped to create… a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture Techno Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody – or at least some force – is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
Technology is not your friend. There is no guiding force behind it, no code of conduct or ethics to bind it to any moral compass and steer its users towards happy destinations. If anything, technology is a tactical nuke in the hands of a curious child – and if we’re not careful, someday somebody somewhere is going to push the big red button that sets it off. It started off small in the beginning. Revolutions always do. Eventually, it grew and spread and wormed its way through our lives, infecting everything it touched and, before anyone could figure out what was going on, it was too late. The new world is already here, and we’re already living in it. God help us.
Computers in the classroom, for instance, will never make students smarter. The Internet, if it’s actually contributing to society at all, is actually making people dumber. It’s changing the fundamental way in which we think, rewiring our brains to accommodate the continuous information flowing into us from every direction. There’s little need to commit anything to memory when you are connected to the web every second of every day and unremembered facts can be recalled with a few keystrokes to Google. Intelligence is falling while searches are rising, and no one seems to care. Soundbites replace discourse, Wikipedia replaces research and document checkers replace the need to know how to spell or how to write using anything even remotely approaching passable grammar. Gradually, we grow ever more dependent upon the beast we’ve created with each passing day, and there’s no end in sight. Eventually, one is reminded of the question many have asked, but few have answered: Are we the users of the technology, or is the technology using us?
I should point out that this is not an indictment against any school district in particular, and certainly not indicative of my experiences in my own district. If nothing else, the school district I’ve worked for has been more responsible than most in sating its techno-lust, with many of its big ticket purchases going towards enhancing existing data management systems to improve efficiency and cut costs. You know, the sorts of things that technology is actually good at. I’m not condemning technology in education, either. Not by any means. As a support mechanism for clerical duties vital to the smoothly running operation of a school system, computers are great. As supplements to traditional teacher-and-text-based curriculum, they’re fabulous. Anything beyond using technology as one of many educating tools, however, makes me question the efficacy of the machines. Do laptops give students at any level (K-12 and higher education) a greater chance of mastering the material than a simple notepad and a pen? I have my doubts. Computers provide limitless distractions, to be sure, but does all of the so-called ‘multi-tasking’ done by today’s students make them more capable of understanding the curriculum, or does it simply spread its message evenly across a surface filled with message boards and online games and YouTube videos of unfortunate men getting smacked in the balls? It’s a tough question with an even tougher answer that I’m probably not qualified to posit, so I’ll avoid it for now and just leave it to you to consider on your own. You might want to read this first, though. (UPDATE:And this. It looks like universities are starting to agree with me.)
I may be burned out on technology, but I’m not completely lost. I still think the Internet holds great potential to change the world for the better. I’m just not sure that my contribution to this change can be best served by staying where I am and continuing to do what I’ve been doing for so long now. I chose to work in education because I believe that an educated populace is essential to the success of any democratic system, and I wanted to be a part of that process – but I think now that I can contribute more to my community and to the world at large by removing my voice from the internal rumblings of a Texas school district and placing it into an external environment from which I can influence change in a more indirect, but much more powerful way. It is to this end that I have decided to leave my career of sixteen years and launch myself in an entirely new direction as a journalist.
Last Friday, I received the call that I’d been waiting on. It was from a member of the Hearst Corporation, offering me a position with one of its publications. Naturally, I accepted with unrestrained and embarrassing enthusiasm. I’d been in talks with them for weeks prior to last Friday’s call, and each day that passed without hearing from them brought with it new worries that maybe I wasn’t a good enough fit for the company, or perhaps they couldn’t meet my salary needs, or any one of a hundred other reasons that were flittering into and out of my head at the time. Fortunately, something in the universe righted itself, and Fortune finally smiled upon me. It’s been a long time coming, but this is only the start. In the coming days, I must prove myself in the crucible of a business for which I may have enormous potential, but with which I have precious little experience. These will be Interesting Times.
I’ll bring you more details as I feel the need to share them, but for now much will remain the same. I don’t start my new position until the end of the month, having given ample notice to my current employer. The problem with working for the same place for sixteen years is that you end up being the only guy who knows how to do certain things, or you’ve just been around long enough to have forgotten more than most of the newer people will ever learn about the older systems. I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks training someone to take over my responsibilities while I try to remember all the places I’ve tucked away various web pages and snippets of code. It’s a daunting task, trying to condense sixteen years worth of experience and routine down into just two weeks, but I work with some really sharp people. I have little doubt that they can pick it all up fairly quickly and be just fine without me after I’m gone.
So that’s it, one chapter closes and a new one opens. Life works like that, usually. Seconds tick by as the hours move along, day after day, churning the months and years of our lives into a swirling suspension of events sent bouncing off one another for eternity in God’s great cosmic blender. Paths cross, lives intertwine, friendships are made, broken and mended – and we go on. We go on through it all, because that’s what people do. We endure.
I’ll miss many things about my time at the school district, but mostly I’ll miss the people. I’ve been fortunate to have had the opportunity to work alongside some truly intelligent, bright people who have at times been as inspiring as they’ve been infuriating over the years. Spend enough time at one place, and the people there slowly become part of your family; a family with whom you fight and laugh and tease as if you were truly related. I’ll be sad to say goodbye when the day comes, but like Dorothy said to the Scarecrow, there’s one person I think I’ll miss most of all: my secretary. She’s managed to become a second mother to me through the time we’ve known each other, and it’s difficult to imagine getting through a single workday without seeking her advice or council on some mundane or pivotal matter. She has, at times, been a stabilizing force in a whirlwind, anchoring me to safe harbor. At other times, she’s been the obnoxious thorn in my side that I can’t quite reach to remove. She’s made me laugh, yell, cry, spit and bleed. (Yes, bleed. It’s a long story.) I’ve grown close to her and her family and, like the Scarecrow, I think I’ll miss her most of all. And, because I enjoy teasing her, I hope she finally finds a brain…
Well, now that I’ve got all of that out of my system, it’s time to say goodbye for another day. I’ll be back on Thursday with a new essay, this time involving a Nintendo DS and some toddler-infused chicanery, with far less dramatic prose than today. I’d apologize for that, but hey, it’s not everyday that a guy aborts his career to start a new life at 35 years old, you know. Cut me some slack and indulge my gluttonous verbiage, just this once. Ok, this 248th time. Whatever.
Want some books? 'Course ya do!
NOTE:I know times are hard and yeah, I need to make a living too, but if you want to read any of my books but can't afford to buy them right now, hit me up.
I'll take care of it.
Humor | Nonfiction Available now from the following retailers
Have you ever lived through an experience that was so humiliating that you wanted to die, but when you tell it to all your friends, they can't stop laughing?
Have you ever made a decision that seemed like a good idea at the time, but you're still living with the hilarious consequences years later?
If so, then grab a snack, get comfortable, and prepare to have all of your own poor life choices seem just a little bit more bearable.
You're welcome.
Short Stories Available now from the following retailers
The nine stories of rage and sadness collected here range from the most intimate of human experiences to the wildest realms of magic and fantasy. The first story is a violent gut-punch to the soul, and the rest of them just hit harder from there.
Those who tough it out will find a book filled with as much hope as despair, a constant contradiction pulling you from one extreme to another.
Life might knock us down, over and over, and will the beat the ever-loving snot out of us from the time we're old enough to give it attitude until the day we finally let it win and stop getting up.
Always get back up.
Gaming | Nonfiction Available now from the following retailers
This isn't just a book. It's a portal to other worlds where there be magic and dragons and hilarious pirates. Okay, not really. But this book is about those portals, except they're called video games.
The Life Bytes series of books take a deep dive into one man's personal journey through childhood into kinda/sorta being a responsible, competent adult as told through the magical lens of whatever video games he was playing at the time.
Part One starts way back in 1975 and meanders down various digital pathways until, oh, around about 1993 or so.
If you're feeling nostalgic for the early days of gaming or if you just want to understand why the gamer in your life loves this hobby so much, take a seat in your favorite comfy chair and crack this bad boy open.
I'll try to not be boring.
Horror Available now from the following retailers
What you are about to read is not a story. There is no beginning, middle, or end.
What follows is nothing more than a series of journal entries involving shadow people, sleep paralysis, and crippling fear. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t follow story logic, and nothing works out well in the end.
The views and opinions expressed on this website, COQUETTING TARRADIDDLES, constitute a work of creative nonfiction, should not be interpreted as factual, and are solely of the individual author of this website, KRISTIAN BLAND, and are not the views of any other individual or organization, or of any individual or organization otherwise affiliated with the author unless explicitly stated within the content of the website.
Publishing Schedule
Coquetting Tarradiddles publishes new essays Whenever I Damn Well Feel Like It, except where prohibited by law.*
*Prices and participation may vary. Always consult a physician before beginning a new reading regimen. Individual results are not guaranteed. If you are pregnant or may become pregnant, do not handle past participles or wayward adverbs. Side effects may include an increase in intelligence followed by overwhelming waves of anger, frustration and rage, irritable bowels and/or various effronteries to good taste and decent folk everywhere. Ask your doctor if Coquetting Tarradiddles is right for you!
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