Computer Tips for All

• You don't need to put "www" in any address line. That's been true for over a decade.
• It's never been a backslash. That's an old DOS thing. It's a forward slash. But because it's always been that, just say "slash" when giving urls.
• You don't need to put the @gmail.com when accessing your email account. In fact, the only email I know of where you do have to put in your entire address is hotmail. Hotmail is run by MicroSoft. Say no more.
• When you want to change a word and you've highlighted it, you don't need to hit the delete key. Just type the word you want to change it to.
• Do not put two spaces after periods. That's an old courier typing rule. Everything now is word processed and the proper spacing from the period to the start of the following word is automated. Don't space inside parenthesis. Do space outside. ( Looks dumb. ) (Looks smart.) One space after a comma.

Many of you will say these are fussy things and keep doing things the way you've been doing them. Go ahead, if you must, but remember that over the years you will make thousands and thousands of unnecessary keystrokes. And you'll look like idiots to the young. 

Treyvon Martin, Racial Profiling, and the Loser

It's October 18, 1996. The Complete and Total Loser is a freelance journalist, which means he's using those checks credit card companies send to pay his bills and he's several thousand dollars in debt. The only real work he gets is writing and copyediting for a small weekly publication that covers just one neighborhood in his city. An affluent neighborhood, but he's just making around $80 a week doing this.

The Loser's previous dwelling and the site of where he was robbed.

It's a Friday. The Loser rents a small apartment on the top floor of a three-story rowhouse of a kind typical of his city.

The landlord is notoriously cheap and the Loser often performs minor maintenance chores around the building on his own. Today that chore is sweeping up the leaves that have fallen. Autumn has arrived early in the Northeast this year. The Loser is wearing old clothes. It's three o'clock in the afternoon. A dead time. The economy is booming and most are at work. The young are still at school. Though his block is large, there are no people on it and it's not a major thoroughfare so there is no traffic.

The Loser sees, approaching from the east, two men walking toward him. They are black, around 30 years old. He thinks of going inside his building and locking the door for a few minutes until they pass. He doesn't want to be seen as a coward or, worse, a racist, so he considers how he will do this. He'll look at his wristwatch, feign surprise, and hurry indoors. He doesn't do this, however. A child of the 60s and early 70s, he knows it's wrong to make assumptions about others based on race. Everyone is beautiful, in his own way. He continues sweeping as if there's nothing to be concerned about.

The men stop. The Loser turns to face them. The one who catches his eye first is the one pointing the gun at him.

He has a tabloid-sized newspaper draped over his arm in the manner of a wine steward, concealing much of the weapon to prevent anyone gazing out a window seeing what's happening.

"Give it up," he says.

The Loser, flummoxed, is mute. He raises his hands high in the air, which looks ridiculous, but he's doing this on purpose. He hopes a neighbor will see him and deduce what's happening and call the police. While the man with the gun points it at him, his cohort goes behind the Loser and rifles through his pockets, taking about $25 and his house keys.

"Where's your wallet at?" the gunman says.

 Best answer: I don't believe in them and I only carry small amounts of cash.

The Loser's answer: "It's locked up ... inside."

The gunman: "We're going inside."

The Loser is stupid, of course, but even he knows that the last thing you do is let an armed stranger take you in a building or a vehicle.

"I don't want to do that," the Loser says. No, not says. Whines.

"We're going inside," the gunman says, "or I'll pop you right here." He nods toward his gun.

The Loser has a malformed right leg and can't run, so he's often before this what he would do.

He calls on the little he learned in his freshman drama class many years ago.

"But ... I ... " The Loser swoons onto the brick sidewalk, as if he's had a heart attack, he hopes.

He lies there, eyes shut, and waits. He wonders if a bullet will be fired into his skull in the seconds following and what that would feel like. He hopes for the best. They already have the $25. Surely that's enough for a hit of whatever they want, and time is passing. Surely they're take off now.

They don't.

The gunman kicks the Loser in the back, not hard.

"C'mon buddy, get up. Get the fuck up."

The Loser sticks to his script and doesn't respond.

Rather than flee, the gunman grabs the Loser under his arms and begins pulling him up the three-step stoop. He's about the Loser's size but strong. Prison muscles. The second man is opening the door. The Loser focuses on being dead weight, which he heard protestors in the 60s did to make it harder for the police to carry them off. It's not working.

The gunman drops something in front of the Loser. The gun clatters to the sidewalk. The Loser knows little about guns, but he can see now that this gun isn't the small caliber handgun he'd thought it was but a pellet gun. The handle where the CO2 cartridge would go is empty.

Time to act.

The Loser struggles and shouts. What he shouts is what you should shout if this happens to you: "Call 911! Crime in progress!"

Not just "Help!" That's something anyone with a large grocery bag might yell at their child. Always give people a specific action to take.

Finally, the Loser's assailants realize that it's time to go. They take off, both heading east, and nearly running into a pedestrian. Within seconds windows open and neighbors are saying they've called the police who are asking for a description.

"Two African-American males!" the Loser relays. Later, he'll be surprised that he used this current and politically correct term.

A police car is there in a minute and they catch one of the men, the gunman. A tip for criminals: Don't rob people in broad daylight three blocks away from a police precinct headquarters. The Loser identifies the man because he's wearing a distinctive windbreaker: It has the logo of the Atlanta Braves baseball team, a grinning Indian. The pedestrian the robbers nearly ran into is in the car with the Loser identifies them too. He happens, the Loser learns later, to be a defense attorney who clerked with the Loser's lawyer brother fifteen years before this day.

The man still has the fake gun on him. A knife, too. The Loser knows what the two men wanted. They wanted to take his credit cards and party all weekend with them. What's the only way to ensure a crime victim doesn't cancel his credit cards? The Loser thinks he would have seen more of that knife if he'd gone inside with them.

These were people not wearing hoodies, which criminals wear to make identification more difficult.

This Exchange Actually Happened

Saturday evening, March 24

Me: I have trouble communicating with women.

She: What do you mean?

Photo Day for the Loser

Sometimes his camera sits in his left front pocket for days without taking a single shot, spurned and ignored but for its weight. Today, the Complete and Total Loser took several photographs. 

The first was of the alien he's mentioned before, the man who fills crossword puzzles with odd circles instead of letters, yet seems to be following the clues. This time it was on the morning train. Again, it was the quiet car, so the Loser didn't ask him what he was doing. That would have been impolite and awkward anyway.

Later, there was a small fire in the kitchen of the 85-year-old building the Loser works in, so the building was evacuated. He, his coworkers and many members of the public spent several happy minutes in an early spring day's unseasonable warmth. 

The Loser dined with a woman, a friend he doesn't know well but seems to get along with. As they parted, the woman bumped into a friend who asked her to join her and her dharma group's gathering to watch their monk dump the sand used in a recent mandala into the city's river. The woman invited the Loser to join them, but he's not part of that group so he sought high ground and photographed the event instead. (The bike in the center is the woman's.)

A dharma group watches their monk pour sand used in a recent mandala into a river.

Shortly afterward, the Loser headed for his train home. He encountered a protest that seemed to be designed to draw attention to the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager shot to death by a townwatch participant. The Loser is a failed journalist. During his reporting days he often attended news events where he saw newscasters for television:

A newscaster and her protege interview a protester.

He also would see camera operators get background images and color for the story:

A television camera operator shoots video of a man playing a plastic trombone at a rally on behalf of Trayvon Martin.

And keeping an eye on many public gatherings are the police, of course:

A police officer keeps an eye on an orderly gathering, just in case.

After this, the Loser boarded his train and napped on the way to the suburbs.

Tourism

Yesterday, The Complete and Total Loser went into his city to meet with a man who's handling the money his late parents left him.

Afterward, he did things a tourist might do. He went to a large enclosed farmers market, the city's main library branch and, most touristy, he paid $5 to go up forty floors to the top of his city's city hall, which was the highest point of the city until the late 1980s. 

Afterward, he took the commuter train back to the suburbs and wrote emails to his friends about his big day out.

A view of part of the Loser's city from forty stories up.

Families After Death

"It can open a window," said Ken to the Complete and Total Loser. "For awhile."

The Loser didn't like hearing his younger yet wiser coworker add that last part. He and his eldest brother were getting along so well in the months following his parents' back-to-back deaths (just fifty-two days apart). His brother, always a swaggering man of complete confidence, successful with women and business, rich, had started to seem like a real person to the Loser, an equal. He talked of normal things, like his concerns with his two teenage children's futures, of how he missed his parents. When the two touched base by phone their "how are you's" were sincere.

Then the Loser spoiled it all by bringing up the $200,000.

That's the sum his father and mother left him as a gift to be given ninety days after the death of the last one to die, a time that came last week. 

"How will we handle that?" the Loser said to his brother in an email.

Trouble followed. 

First, let the Loser be clear. It is a lot of money. He knows that. But is it that much to the Loser's two older brothers? The eldest is president of an executive recruitment firm he founded nearly thirty years ago. He owns four houses, including the one he lives in. Not crappy fixer-uppers, real houses; investment properties in three states. A good part of New Jersey (Cape May); a pricey location in Florida which, the Loser is told, has a low percentage of Jews and a high percentage of old money; two in the community he lives in, which is the richest suburb of his city, an area that is named for a shorthand description of East Coast snobbery and wealth. He drives a car that cost more than the Loser nets in three years. For his daughter's sixteenth birthday, he'll give her a large Mercedes Benz, which now takes up more than half of the two-car garage attached to his late parents' house in which the Loser has been living since their deaths to take care of things until he and his brothers sell it.

The other brother, the middle one, is similarly well off. His house, in the same suburb as his brother's and his parents', is worth well over one million dollars. He too drives a late model, high-end luxury car. A Benz. His second house is on an exclusive island unheard of by those who don't live or summer there because everything's so private that a day tourist disembarking from the ferry that links the island to the Connecticut coast would find that the only options for activities would be a grocery store and one restaurant. The only blacks on the island are cooks. There are no Jews. His wife is a drug company heiress. If you've ever had a cold or an upset stomach you've used products her grandparents' company produces, and that's just on the over-the-counter end; the prescription drugs bring in far more. Her net worth is in the high tens of millions of dollars, an amount which will burgeon when her parents die. Meanwhile, the brother, no gold digger, is president of a lobbying consortium and makes a comfortable mid-six figure salary. 

The Loser's net worth is around fifty thousand dollars. He nets twenty-two thousand dollars a year, and that's thanks to a recent promotion. The head of his department is a mercurial sort, known for firing at a whim in a state in which that's allowed. The Loser is nine years away from getting even the minimal in Social Security benefits. His job requires that he is on his feet all day, despite his withered right leg, and his aging body aches at the end of each day. He does not date, always eats in, and his most expensive possession is the Mac Mini his using now, which he bought eighteen months ago.

With the sale of the house, the Loser's brothers, after surrendering the portion of the estate his parents bequeathed him, would still have over $350,000 they didn't before. But when the Loser mentioned the money he had due, a storm followed. The eldest brother talked about the Loser living "rent free" in the house, which the Loser considers a housesitting gig, which usually nets him $1,000 a month when doing it for others. He talked about the Loser's use of his parents' car, a 1998 Toyota Camry with a book value of around $4,000, maybe. And he mentioned his own work in dealing with estate matters gratis, which the Loser previously told him he should pay himself for out the estate.

The middle brother described the Loser's invitation for them to share their net worth with him, as he has with them, as "cheap shot." 

To sum up, things are turning to shit.

The death of his parents indeed opened a window and the brothers saw each other for the first time as close relatives with the same parents rather than rivals vying for the attention of those parents. The Loser is learning what closes the window shared grief opened. Money.

The black speck on top of the building's corner is a very vocal crow.

The Loser Gets a Cold

He sneezes hugely. Loud sneezes that feel great and shake his body. It's his grandfather's sneeze, a man who died years before the Complete and Total Loser's birth. His mother told him how when her father sneezed while sitting on the porch the firemen two blocks away would hear it and laugh.

And the Loser, like a man in a cartoon or old cold remedy commercial, sneezes when a cold approaches as did last week.

It's his first cold of the year and the winter season. Blame his job, which puts him in contact with the public. Blame the stress of the job: He worked thirteen hours one day, that on top of a two hour commute.

The cold makes the Loser's nose run. He goes to a drug store to get Sudafed, the only remedy that's ever done anything for him. They scan his driver's license before selling it to him in case he manufactures methamphetamine in his spare time. The box the woman hands him (short hair, cute) says it's the non-drowsy formula. This translates, to the Loser, as ineffective crap that might as well have the same value as a homeopathic remedy, i.e., zero. She assures him that all such products are non-drowsy now and the Loser misses packaging that warned against operating heavy machinery. 

He takes three tablets, one pill above the stated dosage, and gets through the workday without blowing his large nose more than once every fifteen minutes or so.

Colds are caused by viruses and there are over two hundred of them. The Loser finds that each virus has its own personality of sorts. This one is sharp and severe, but brief. Three days after the cold's onset the Loser is functioning normally, albeit with sinuses full of snot. A week later, the congestion lingers, but the other symptoms, which have the force of those in television commercials, are largely dissipated. 

The Loser's nostrils may look clear but inside they're packed, as if with mud.

$35

Thirty-five dollars is the perfect amount for a man to have in his wallet. It's enough to buy a good enough meal and have a beer with it. It'll buy enough gas to get you where you're going or pay for a cab home. A twenty or less and you have to watch yourself and wonder if an ATM is close enough to wherever you are. Over $35 and you may overspend on an impulse buy. A man knows he won't blow money on a shirt or a tie when he has $35, but he also knows he can get something on sale that's nice. 

Thirty-five dollars is what the Complete and Total Loser's father had in his wallet on the day he went to a hospital for his final stay in December and is the amount in that wallet now. 

The Loser's brother saw the wallet and told the Loser to take the money. (The Loser is poor and is looking after his late parents' house until he and his brothers sell it.) 

The Loser demurred.

The wallet, which the Loser bought for his father a couple of weeks after his mother died in October (it was not a good autumn for the Loser and his family) also contains:

• A Visa card
• A tiny square of printed paper with the number to call an insurance agent in the event of a car accident
• An American Express card
• A Capitol One card
• An Extra Care card from CVS pharmacy. You would not believe how much pharmacies were a part of the Loser's parents' lives in their final years
• A crucifix which the Loser found literally seconds before writing the sentence you are now reading. The Loser's father didn't believe in God but liked church for its communal aspects. The crucifix is just over an inch long and worn.
• The card you're supposed to have handy in case a parking official questions your handicapped parking placard
• A driver's license
• Five Forever postage stamps. Motif: The Liberty Bell
• Three blank checks 
• Four key chain cards, the kind you scan at supermarkets to get extra savings
• A business card. It bears the photo the Loser used for his father's death notice in his city's newspaper. In it, his father is smiling broadly. It's a good shot. One of the Loser's brothers disapproved of it, saying that he looked Jewish, but the Loser stuck with it. Photos in which his father wasn't smiling made him look dour, a characteristic no one who knew him would associate with his affable, genial dad. His father was 91 when he died and the likelihood of him selling another house (he was a Realtor) was remote. But he kept his license up and you never know ...
• On three small squares of paper, in with the cash, hand-written lists of phone numbers for doctors and family members. Two decades ago, you could criticize someone who didn't know his sons' phone numbers, especially if he just had three sons. Now, boomers often have two numbers in addition to their work numbers as they're reluctant to part with their landlines.

In his last years the Loser's father, though finally admitting to an at least partial retirement, never failed to go out and shop, even when he and his ailing wife had plenty of food and other supplies. The Loser chided him for such a waste of fuel and time, but he sees the purpose. America is a consumer society. I shop, therefore I am is not entirely a joke. The items in the Loser's father's wallet show intent, plans, preparation. He was out and about, a member of the public, a target of advertisers. He was somebody.

An partially exploded view of the contents of the Loser's father's wallet.