It's 12 o'clock, do you know where your lunchpail is?

The person I've been working with for the past year on making this transition has warned me more than once that it will Take Time for (as I put it) the sediment to fall to the floor and the water to clear.   So, I was sitting there at C&P Coffehouse in West Seattle, thinking to make friends and update my blogs, contemplate The Next Step and why I wasn't working on my training when I allowed myself to be friendly to people who were having email problems.

Now really, how many of us spend time during the weekday hanging out at coffeehouses... that's what I thought.  Same here.  Neither did I before this time.  I'd spend time in European coffeehouses / bars while travelling, but that is not the same thing.  American coffeehouses during the weekday seem to be filled with industrious people Doing Things, or, at least appearing to be Doing Things.  I ended up engaged in computer support.

This, I am now convinced is why coffee houses are so popular in the U.S.  As David says, "the home user..." has no where else to go since tech support companies no longer want to support the home user.  So, they go to the coffee house in hopes of engaging a bored Web Designer or blogger to "fix" their latest technical issues with their email.  I spent my first 30 minutes looking at some guy's "abandoned" Apple email & address book.  Not because I have much experience with Apple or Apple email and address books, but because I could do a web search.  I thought he was just going to go up for coffee and come back, but he never did.  I eventually found how apple mail doesn't have the contact list embedded in their email program but has spawned the hellaciously ineffective "Address Book" which has like no features.  I exported his contact list but he had such a messy desktop, I couldn't find it to edit it and reimport it.  I tried to explain to him... and then we got into a discussion of technology, technological change, poetry, painting, and Prometheus.

Next was the guy whose gmail account was sending all emails to trash and he'd "really" talked to google support who told him his "IP had been hacked".  uhm...

The web designer sitting next to me was much more patient that I was.  He obviously has experience with being The Techie in the Coffee House.  He tried to check out the guy's settings.  The guy was sure there was another problem, but didn't want to delete all his labels.  He'd been doing some weird setting thing, was getting a shit ton of spam in his email.  An hour later, I just had to pack up.  He'd repeated himself, his story, and was still unconvinced of the need to delete the million and one labels he'd set up, much less change his google password (because he has 3 pages of them - like "Who doesn't?).

Next time, I'm wearing my ear buds and listening to my Statisical Inference videos instead.