You Have Been DisCommunicatEd

I am an article writer. It happened by happy accident combined with a touch of desperation. The small engineering factory that I had managed for some years closed down. No notice, no forewarning, just the sound of a door slamming shut. The owners said they were losing money on a monthly basis and preferred not to be in business until the current financial crash had passed. They gave me a chromium-plated watch, a few hundred dollars and waved goodbye. I didn’t wave back. I went and sat on the beach, looked at the breakers and thought. Where do I go from here?

Back at home I lay on the couch and thought. What am I good at? What can I do? Will anyone pay for that? The answers were clear: Nothing; Nothing; and No. Finally good sense prevailed and I opened the newspaper and started turning pages in search of the crossword, my refuge in times of stress.

I froze when I saw a one-line advert. ‘Writer wanted. Contact Danny at Danny456@hmail.com’      I can write, I thought. Would Danny pay for my writing? I dashed off a reply. “What do you want written?” The answer came back an hour later. “Write us 500 word articles about gambling. We pay at the end of each month at the rate of 10 cents per word. Send us 60 well-written articles each month. Start now!”

I was saved. I sat down and started. I banged away on my ancient computer as though I’d been doing it for years. I wrote as fast as I could. I waited a day and read what I had written and deleted everything. The same happened on the second day and again on Day 3. I was learning. After a week like this I read what I thought was a good article. I gave it a title and file name and sent it off. My first writing venture.

I now understood what I had to do and I became a furious article writer. My 2006 model computer warmed to the task and was with me all the way. I wrote and saved. Computer filed and remembered. The more I used the computer the easier it became. I started reading other articles in the newspapers and magazines and when I liked them I saved them in the computer. I filed everything under the year. That soon became a large file, so I filed under months and that too became fat. I resorted to weeks, numbering them according to the calendar hanging on the wall of my working niche.

One day when I was writing an article about a prize winning poker contest, I wanted to add some facts that were in an article I had written and saved. I looked for it, first under the year. Not there. Under the months. Not there either. Under the weeks. Nothing. Where was it? I checked my filing system and discovered that what I thought had been a logical and easy-to-find system was a mess. I couldn’t even find my own articles.

I’ve been ‘Discommunicated’ I thought, not bothering to look that long word up in the dictionary. I promised myself to be more careful when I was saving my articles.  

I kept on writing gambling articles. The more I wrote the more new gambling ideas flew into my head. The client was excellent. He or she had promised to pay at the end of every month, and sure enough, they did. The money rolled in. I never knew them. I never met them. I never spoke to them. Great arrangement. The months passed and then years and I kept writing and my client kept paying. I tried to follow one of my articles to see where it went and I succeeded for a while. Then it disappeared into the bowels of a translation service – I came across a note thanking the client for the check they had received for the translation of my article into some strange foreign language. I tried following that, but it also disappeared.

One day a strange email arrived. It was from my client. He or she asked me to resend an article I had written on Roulette odds 5 months previously. I remembered the article. One of my great ones. I looked back 5 months times 4 weeks and started searching. It wasn’t there. I moved forward one week. Nothing there. I moved back one week. Nothing.

All I found was a scrambled-mix of stuff. Where are my articles?

“I’ve been ‘Discommunicated’, I thought. Now what? Write it again. Amazingly, I can remember odd lines and killer words from many of my articles. But, I had thought that I would wait a few years and try and set up a blog or some other way of raising retirement dollars by rewriting, editing and re-posting my own articles. Keep waiting, Doctor Alzheimer…

In a last attempt to find out what was wrong with my filing system, I saved a bunch of two-word files in this week and next week’s files. Then I tried to open them. Disappeared. Gone. Not a trace. It’s definite, now. I’ve been ‘Discommunicated’.

My next option is call in a grandchild to help me. I ran through the list and settled on Lil, an officer in the army. She works in the logistics department. When I once asked her ‘what exactly do you do?’ she said ‘I’m chained to a computer, day in and day out. "I can tell you where every piece of army property is, from handguns to tanks, at that precise moment. Great job! Boring, boring…"

She came in that evening on her way home from the base, fiddled with my beloved computer, and then shook her head. “Pop, this thing is an antique. The software is also about 3 versions old and anything you try and do here will be useless.”

“But I write articles, and send them off. They are fine, I am paid regularly to the last cent.”

“What else do you do on this computer?”

“Um , I listen to music. I play bridge against it and it always wins. Scrabble too.”

“These articles you send off, are you sure they’re going?”

“Must be. They pay.”

“They probably have some old software on their computer too. Listen, Pop, the army changes computers every 3 years, no matter what. I will save a laptop in good condition for you. I’ll call you when it’s available and you come and collect it. Okay? You have to update, Pop!”

So I did update as Lil suggested. And the new laptop is great. But I always run out to park my car in the garage and close the doors when I hear Lil’s coming to visit. My car is a 2006 model. Purrs along as though I bought it yesterday...  Update?