I stayed up all night and all day because I was very fretful about the cat. At dusk I finally crashed hard for four or five hours. I dreamed that We were selling ‘everything’ off, liquidating assets. When I found out that my pickup was let go for a mere $1900 and that I wasn’t even going to see that pittance, I was extremely pissed–heartbroken really. I stayed that way for what felt like a long time.

When I started to wake up and realized that the truck was still here in reality it was a big relief and I was grateful.

***

Tangent time.

The part of the system called “division of labor”, or specialization, isn’t working out. For me or in general

First it was the plumbers. The people my patron called in for me were stupid and arrogant, and they would have been crazy expensive too, except I yelled at them, through her speakerphone, and in a moderately civil way, that they would never see a dime, and were invited to go fuck themselves. Then I got on Yelp and found somebody else, and they were brilliant, and cheap. A rare success story. Ironically they weren’t really plumbers but HVAC guys. I still haven’t had them back to look at the HVAC, but neither the AC nor the HV are being used. For now. So it’s okay. For now.

Then it was the mechanics. I’ve dealt with a couple dozen of them in recent years, and I’ve got to say that I haven’t been truly satisfied with a single one of them. Half are really bad, half are kinda okay-ish sometimes, and only a couple have inspired any fair measure of trust in me at all. Case in point–the latest one.

Patron offered to get my PS pump fixed in between plumbers. I had some new guys do it because they are easy walking distance from my house. They did so. Except … when I got the car back it had no power steering, and I had to take it back in and listen to them wonder out loud what *I* did wrong. It turned out that the pump they installed was defective right from the factory.

This shouldn’t have been a big deal, and it wasn’t really, but it wouldn’t have been any kind of deal if they had simply test-driven their own work before handing it back to me. C-minus, amigos. Oh, and they had the gall to magnanimously inform me that they were waiving the charges for installing the second new pump. I mean … god damn right you are, mfers.

The expert mechanics in Fort Collins were something of a disappointment. So were the experts in Flag. I don’t imagine you want to care about the details, so I’ll spare you.

And now … the veterinarians.

***

Kitty has been a constant concern for months now and it reached a peak in the wee hours of Friday, and like I said, I was fretting.

I turned to the AI for help and learned a bunch of things that the one local vet should have told me already when I was paying her, repeatedly. Again, you don’t care about the details, but I cut her kitty meds in half and found out what the pros use to treat cats who are scratching and chewing their own skin bloody, a follow-on symptom from Kali’s original problem.

This cutting-out-the-experts approach mirrors pretty precisely what happened when I had the chronically sick Alli turned into my problem and went along with quarantining her in what used to be my bedroom, for literal years–until I got fed up, did my own research, and learned that she never really had to be segregated for that long in the first place.

My bedroom is finally my bedroom again, and that adorably gross orphan furball is doing as well as can be expected.

***

I don’t think very many people in this world of businesses actually know what the fuck they’re doing, or care deeply about truly doing it well.

The point of the game isn’t excellence. The point of the game is to do the least and get paid the most.

I was really quite guilty of it myself, in my working days.

It’s how you play it smart, and of course everybody’s smart now, because they have a phone with them at all times.

***

Expertise is a kind of arms race.

I feel a lot of very different things about AI, but mainly I feel it’s a Gun.

Another step fake-forward technologically, that can be leveraged to advantage in situations both violent or mercenary.

This world we’ve chosen to build is both, on purpose, because that’s how our greed, yours and mine and his and hers, wants it to be.

We’re so civilized ennit.

So very banal toward the evils that surround us and sometimes fill us.

I’m fretting now about that, and de-domestication, and about how to save my kittybaby’s life.