Today I got camera satisfaction. Took a while. I had to plow through eight levels of people, and each time my blood boiled a little more, but I was finally able to get satisfaction. I’d get a new camera in two days. Finally. I hung up, and then the phone rang right away. Conversation. Bottom line: I needed a camera TOMORROW. Or else.

I'd have to buy one from a local supplier. CompUSA. Is this bad? Not necessarily - it costs more, but they’ll be around in a few years, whereas internet companies might well detonate next month.

(Sidenote: Lousy story today in the WSJ about boo.com - a few eye-rolling anecdotes, but too short to detail the stupendous idiocy that must have suffused that operation from top to bottom. And it made no mention whatsoever of the main reason boo failed: the moronic “A new window is being opened by your browser” message that greeted you when you entered the site. That was like entering the front door of a store and instantly being shoved through another smaller door off to the right for no apparent reason. [And for longtime gamers, it was like a message from Quake or Hexen: a door has opened elsewhere.] The rest of WSJ contained all sorts of bad news for etailers - 80% of available ad capacity is going unused, for example; click-thru on ad banners has dropped below one percent.)

So - should I buy from this company when I know they’re selling the camera for $50 below their wholesale cost? Hmm? Yes, yes, I know: they lose money on every item but make it up on volume.

I give them a year. If that. They’ve just merged with another company, so they might hang around. But my faith in this little camera has been shaken. If it breaks once, it might again, and I don’t want to suffer downtime. CompUSA is right down the street. Well, no - they're 10 mintues away, and if they don't have the camera, the closest one is 20 miles away, but I can go there in my car tonight. Spend the same amount of time I'd spend on hold going to actually GET THE PRODUCT, plus I get to listen to the music i want to hear, not hold music interspersed with cheery endorsements of the company's wonderfulness. Plus, if I buy the replacement policy package, I get a new one for ANY REASON for two years.

I called CompUSA, expecting to get the local store. No. I got some drone in some windowless office somewhere. Her greeting was simple:

“Your Area Code, please,” she said. I heart the murmurs of thousands of other operators in the background. I had an image of these people in a Matrix-like complex, hanging from the ceiling, feeding tubes snaking in and out of their limbless torsos, LCDs hung in front of their eyes, robots patrolling the aisles to vary the stimulant drips depending on the call volume.

I gave her my zip, and told her the name of the product I wanted info on. I was also staring at the CompUSA web page, which listed the area locations. “Roseville,” I added - it was closer to the office.

“Plezehol,” she said. So I holded. She came back and said that they had none. “Can I try another location for you,” she said.

“Could you try the Bloomington location?” I said.

“What did I just ask,” she said to herself, sarcastically.

Oh, my. Oh. Bite tongue.

She said they had one. And Minnetonka had three. Who-hoo! That was it, then. I’d cancel the mailorder order, pay more for the security contract, and get peace of mind.

Called wife to see when she’d be home for supper; in the course of the conversation she asked if tomorrow was the day the Salvation Army was coming by to collect the old furniture from the spare room.

Completely forgot about that. “Yep,” I said.

“And you can get it all outside yourself?”

“Sure can.”

Hung up. Called the Giant Swede. He’d help me carry it out. But he was in Detroit. Hung up. Uh Oh.

Looked at the clock: 5 PM.

Looked at the screen: I hadn’t actually written a column yet.

I was . . .screwed. I stood, left the building, walked a few blocks to a downtown restaurant. Had a fast meal, reading the paper, thinking happy happy thoughts. Walked back to the paper. Cracked the knuckles. Taptaptap. One hour later: a column. Drove home. Fed dog; dog was happy. Disassembled all furniture, moved it to the porch. Took 14 trips. Some of it was . . . heavy; the mattress got away from me when I was talking it down the stairs. Whoa! I said. WHOA! WHOOOOAAA NELLIE and then it crashed into the wall, crumpled, laid flat. Why can’t you have structural integrity like the box spring? Got it all out, sweating like a sweating person, then: walk the dog! Enjoy woods! Savor evening! Back home, in car, out to Bloomington.

They didn’t have the camera after all!

In fact, the computers showed that NO ONE in the ENTIRE CHAIN had one.

Please, I said. Call Minnetonka. After seven minutes on hold, it turned out they did have one. The store was a ways away; if the metro area is a clock dial, Bloomington is the bottom of the hour, and Minnetonka is a quarter to. I got in the Defiant, and drove 84 MPH to Minnetonka. Arrived at 8:59:59. They let me in. They looked for the camera.

They didn’t have one.

No, wait a minute, here it is, they’d set aside.

Drove home slooowww, thinking: all I have to do now is explain to my wife why I bought a new camera before returning the old one.

Considered joining Foreign Legion. Decided against it.

Sand’s bad for the camera.

“You can stop anytime,” my wife suggested. She was looking at the stack of the manuscript for the Gallery book. It’s thick. It’s very thick. It keeps getting thicker. Tonight I spent The Scanning Hour (6:30 - 7:30 PM) on a batch of miscellaneous items, building up the great backlog from which I will construct the next year of the site, and I found a few unscanned books I’d set aside as possible Gallery chapters. Well, it’s now 11:02, and the books have been scanned, resized, recut, laid out; the copy’s written and I printed them out. Twelve more pages.

I can stop anytime. Really, I can. I just don’t feel like stopping.

The Alcoholics Anonymous convention is in town tomorrow. As I came to work today I noticed a broad blue line painted on the sidewalk outside the Strib. “What’s this?” I said to one of the veteran smokers by the door.

“We figure it’s a line to help them find their way back to their hotel,” he said. “So we were thinking of painting it off at an angle and leading it over to the Wagon.”

It’s a common theme around town this week: somehow the appearance of the AA convention leads people to think that we’re about to get 50,000 top-flight boozers in full souse-me-up mode. On the contrary. It’s coffee and cigarettes for these folk, by the gallon and the carton. But when the fellow said “The Wagon,” I had to smile.

The Wagon is a bar in a parking ramp two blocks away. The ramp is new; so is the bar, but the original Wagon was just across the street from the paper. It was a serious bar, a bar where livers suffered on a colossal scale. A newspaper bar for the scribblers and the printers. The windows were always closed with heavy drapes. A small dusty wagon sat in the window. The name said it all: come on in and fall off the wagon. We’ll help push.

Got an interesting letter from someone the other day. He’d been to the Star-Tribune office to sell a photograph, and had walked past my desk. He thought it was sort of a nifty minor modern treat - read the web page, see the office desk. I was just glad I’d recently shoveled all the krep off. Offices are always disappointing anyway, and mine is especially so; it has all sorts of items that mean nothing to anyone, and just look stupid. Plastic toys - Nick Park characters, some Star Wars crap, Barbie with a cheese-wedge eraser on her head, Duke Nukem just to be unPC.
Some Coke ads, Jasper pix. A typical beige cog-box. But there are some bits of Strib history - a huge photo (35” X 20”) of Eisenhower driving past the building in the mid 50s. A copy of a watercolor of the building done in 1949 by the president of Northwestern Bank. A few in-house ads from the 50s. (A bald man is standing at a dinner table, declaiming pretentiously; in the foreground a fellow with a white-haired bouffant says “of course he knows his facts; he reads the Tribune.”) And, of course, a few of my prized Cedric Adams ads and photos.

Who?

Cedric Adams means zip to most folk nowadays, and means slightly more than zip to me; I never read his column, since he kicked off before my time. But there are certain parallels to our careers - he started out writing “college” humor, did a regular newspaper column, did radio, published a few books. The differences are more significant - he was hugely popular, massively beloved, a Minnesota cultural icon, and I should be so lucky. I am a better writer than he was - but writing skill wasn’t the reason he was popular, since he mostly peddled corn and sub-Winchell palaver.

Here’s an excerpt from a column written 50 years ago:
“Sad is the situation for the droll penguin. One penguin, it seems, just can’t recognize the sex of another . . . Revised definition, Matrimony: the one state that permits a woman to work 18 hours a day . . . A new raincoat fabric exhales heat and makes the wearer more comfortable on those hot or clammy days.
Give Away Department: CANARIES, HY 1049. . . .Part cocker Pup, MA 4934. . .”

I’m not kidding.
But. He had a magic genial ubiquity that endeared him to the vast merry middle, and from all accounts he was a splendid fellow who deserved every jot of love he got. I wish I’d met him.

The ad I have on my desk is a series of pictures of Cedric wondering what to write about. He’s lighting a smoke, peering into the distance. “I know!” he says in the last panel. “I’ll write about YOU!” It’s just what I do, really, except that while my column has a give & take with the audience, there’s no pretense that I’m here to pass along news about lost dogs, or Mrs. Anderson’s prize begonias. That sort of folksy schmaltz makes my teeth hurt, and I simply cannot pretend to be fascinated by unexamined inanities.

But I do trade in pointless minutia, and I enjoy it. I like to give it a twist, and occasionally give it as dark a spin as this mass-medium will bear. In 30 years I will be regarded as a bland wimp by whoever comes along afterwards, no doubt. So let me say this now: just mention my name in this list of columnists for the Star Tribune, and if they decide I was the last one of the 20th century, that’ll be fine with me.


No Bleat Friday. I need a day off to sit on the porch and rest. Last time I looked it was May - a month, gone. I’m not going to let this happen with July. I’m going to hang on to every lovely day we get.