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tech meltdown in the Adirondacks
Friday, May 30 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
During the mandatory lunch break in my remote workday, I visited the extension of the Chamomile Wall westward across the Stick Trail and added a few more rocks. But it's hard to get into the zone on a project like that when you have a hard cutoff in a half hour.
At the end of the workday, Gretchen still had some calls to make related to her volunteer work for NYAF (the New York Abortion Fund), since she was handling one of their phone lines this week. But once those were done, we could drive up to our Adirondack cabin for what was predicted to be a cold, rainy weekend.
We tried stopping at Love Shine Tea in Schoharie, but they must've closed at 5:00pm, so we wouldn't be having any fun flatbreads or espresso drinks for the road. As is customary, I let Gretchen and Charlotte out to walk the last mile or so to the cabin, and took the opportunity to piss. When I did that, Neville jumped out too, so all three of them did that walk. Temperatures were in the 60s at the cabin, which counted as muggy, so there were annoying insects to torment us whenever we were outside.
The moment she got to the cabin, Gretchen immediately had to do NYAF work. Unfortunately, though, she would be doing it on a different laptop (my work-issued one), since my usual laptop was having one of its drives cloned at the time back in Hurley. So she had to create Chrome profiles (her own and for NYAF) on it and then do some sort of stupid two-factor-authentication ritual. This might not have been too difficult were it not for the crappy nature of the internet at the cabin. But because of that, everything was loading slowly (which, in these interfaces made by people who always have excellent internet, is indistinguishable from not loading at all). To help get data to Gretchen faster, I also set up a Chromebook, though that didn't help much. So Gretchen started having one of her classic meltdowns, yelling at the computer, flailing about randomly and beating on the trackpad. I was worried she was going to do something stupid like smash her fist through a screen. But eventually the profiles all loaded and Gretchen was able to do enough of her work that she could go back to reading a novel she'd brought with her.
We ended up just browsing on snack food and not having a proper meal.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?250530 feedback
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