When I came up to work the cash register today, my coworker told me that there was a mountain lion trapped in downtown Santa Cruz. By the time that shift ended, my 'career' as a bookseller, for lack of a better term, was over.
The mountain lion was not actually in downtown Santa Cruz, it was in an aqueduct some distance away. I used to walk over that aqueduct every day in a former life, and remember it chiefly for the wild ducks that frequented it.
In the time immediately after this announcement, I got into a lot of nice interactions with people and one exceedingly bad one, where a woman wanted to forego the now mandatory by city ordinance paper bag fee (one dime) because she was a regular customer who spent four hundred dollars a year there. Frankly, flaunting your money is the thing least likely to move me as a lowly salesclerk, but there you go. Of course this is the kind of person who would rather call and complain than pay a dime for a bag, so that's exactly what she did. My employer demanded to have an account of the conversation. I refused. That is pretty much where my longstanding relationship with this bookstore and independent bookstores in general ended. Live long and prosper if you can, but not with my support.
I was going to say that I'm sorry to authors everywhere that I will no longer be able to support their books there, but really, I have no compunction at all now about supporting them on Amazon and by any other means I can, which will be, if not better, at least equally helpful.
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Damn. Other than that, how was your day?
ReplyDeleteActually, great. My day has been surprisingly not affected by the loss of a livelihood.
ReplyDeleteAnd the mountain lion was apparently not adversely affected either. It was tranquilized, which helped it get out of the aqueduct alive.
I think there are parallels here, but a bit hard to pin down.
Thanks for this. I was feeling bummed about an impending lack of summer work aka paychecks. Now I'm just glad not to be a tranquilized mountain lion with entitled customers.
DeleteAnd thanks to you as well, Collagemama. I hope some summer work turns up for you.
DeleteCrikey, I'm supposed to be the one who sees the funny side to bad situations.
ReplyDeleteWell, it's not really a bad situation. It's something I have been wrestling with doing for awhile but had previously talked myself out of.
ReplyDeleteThere's a poem by Stevie Smith called Anger's Freeing Power that I've always liked, and certainly have found it to be the case for me.
Well, I hope you land on your feet. And naturally I hope the mountain lion is all right, too. How did it get trapped? Couldn't it have found its way out one end? Or are mountain lions just not that bright?
ReplyDeleteLeave it to my brilliant sister to find this intriguing parallel. Seana, I applaud you - and even though it is the end of a long career, it stopped on a dime. I love that!
ReplyDeleteI know great things will come of this. It was time anyway. Talk to you soon...
I was going to say that the metaphor of the mountain lion was one of a creature that had wandered into a lush ravine only to discover that it had tapered off into a dried out concrete trap. However, the mountain lion's adventure wasn't really like that.
ReplyDeleteHere is the entire saga of the mountain lion.
Yes, Peter, all will be well. And thanks, Julie. And aloha!
Seana, as the mountain lion, I know you have landed on your feet, strong and ready for what life brings you next. I've always thought change is good, and can act as a catalyst to bring new greatness into your life that you never expected. Some things you cannot plan. But I know change can be stressful too. Thinking of you. - Janet
ReplyDeleteThanks, Janet. And I think you came up with a better metaphor than I did!
ReplyDeleteAloha, you say? Planning a trip?
ReplyDeleteV-words: actibus Hugenot, which suggests that French Protestants were both vigorous and retained their Latin.
No, no trips as yet, but my sister happens to be in Hawaii.
ReplyDeleteGreat Vword phrase! They are a bit better, now that Google isn't trying to get us decipher street addresses.
I notice, as I'm sure you do, too, the abrupt shifts in Captcha tactics, from distorted letters, to numbers, to, now, relatively legible words. But i have noticed a tendency toward distorted letters in the past few days, so another change may be afoot.
ReplyDeleteOne of my current words, for example, looks like a blow-up of a manually typed word on highly absorbent paper, complete with fuzziness.
My sense is that one word is something like the old Captcha words, though usually not as good, and the other is from some document that Google has scanned and is a word that they find debatable for some reason or another, and like the street addresses, they are getting various random people to make a guess at. However, this is entirely a guess.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds right. I had read some time back that Capthca words were helping Google so scan documents.
ReplyDeleteHere's mine: wipssag But
I got curious so I started searching around a bit. I found a page of discussion about it HERE, but the most pertinent comment was this:
ReplyDelete"It works like this. The captcha challenge shows the user 2 images. One is the traditional image that the computer knows what it is. The second is a photo that the computer doesn't know what it is.
By answering the first one correct, you prove you are human and thus the second one is probably correct. However they don't trust just one person the same image is used against several humans and the result recorded. The most common result is determined to be the "correct" result. (ambiguous ones may be evaluated by google professionals or discarded)
Optical Character Recognition is AI based and requires training of the AI. Training requires correct answers and larger variety of situations. This then validated data is stored and used to train image recognition. Ironically making Google's bots able to recognize the images ;)
This same technique is used for scans of the library of congress."
Aha! That explains why the second word is not always necessary.
ReplyDeleteYes, but as someone over on that forum explained, you don't always know which one that word is.
ReplyDeleteI haven't read the forum yet, but it seems to me that it's generally the first that's necessary. But I'm sure such things change rapidly.
ReplyDeleteFor the comment I just made, the first word was the relevant one.
ReplyDelete