I’ve been doing the same thing for about a dozen years. I’ve seen personalities come and go. They have grand designs in the beginning but almost always end up doing some rendition of a perp-walk at the end. I started in what could be described as a maelström of confusion and a general state of DIY-clunkiness. Now I’m not going to actually name anyone or any definite thing, those that know me and know my long-standing straw-men will know exactly what I’m talking about in this article, it’s a metaphorical story after all. If you take an exception to what I write here, then perhaps you should do some of your own personal introspection. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Imagine buying a car, the place where you buy it has only one dealership in the entire world and you are in luck, it’s only a mile away. Everything you could ever need is hosted by the car company, by the dealership – everything! They’ll sell you the car, they’ll service it, they’ll help you find things to stick to it to make it better – it looks wonderful on paper.
When you walk into your new apartment, you see the car in the driveway and it looks quite unusual. It still has a car-like shape but the fresh weld-points where unusual non-car-like things and things that perhaps might go on a car if designed by a desperate mechanic appear. You find out that the paperwork from the dealership is burnt in some places and has unthinkable stains in other places. The car runs, sort of, but every once in a while it shocks the passengers and makes them visibly tremble. Years go by, you trade in the DIY wreck and over time you get the impression that even after buying a new car from the dealership and agreeing to play by all their rules that they really are quite occupied doing other things. One day you wake up, blink and rub at your eyes and notice that there are lots of other cars parked in your neighbors driveways. You’ve fought tooth and nail and you’ve got a premium luxury vehicle that carries your passengers on a cloud of happiness and you are quite satisfied as long as you only see your driveway. If you look around you notice Trabants and Yugos and Horizons littering your neighbors driveways and you don’t understand how so many people can fit in such awful vehicles and you just stop thinking about them. You have faith that somehow life goes on for everyone, whether they are being stuffed into a Trabant or a rusted-out Horizon.
Your dealership has expanded now, not only does it do cars, but everything else. Not only should you use the dealership, but your told you must use the dealership. You notice a crack developing in your driveway, and the new paving company is the dealership. You let them know the crack is there and growing and then you don’t hear anything from them. Years go by, four of them, and then after having enough you walk down to city hall and you complain about the dealership, the next day the entire crack is gone, and you notice the color of the pavement is different and then that feeling sets in. Something is wrong. You are finally happy so you shut your trap and hope you don’t have to wait another four years for help.
Over the intervening years you go to the dealership, you suffer little wounds each time you walk in their doors, after a while, and since nobody else is yelling loudly, you imagine that the rather lousy dealership is just how things are and your dissatisfaction melts into a kind of muddy attitude. Your once springy step is now pretty much a dreary trudge. Life goes on. The dealership remains standing tall, and then you notice that your sink trap, which you’ve asked to have looked at, has remained ignored for three whole years and some time. You’ve made do, you’ve gotten your work done, the sink does work but not exactly how you’d like it to. The dealership really doesn’t have doors anymore, it took wire cutters to its phone lines and the postman has no idea how to get in to make deliveries. The only way that you can communicate with the dealership now is with a tattered clutch of semaphore flags. When you grab your manual and your flags and try to get messages to the dealership, you feel foolish and that perhaps you’re just wasting your time. You’d put the flags in a foot locker and forget all about them, but you need the dealership, so you continue to make foolish motions knowing that nobody is probably looking at you or your flags.
I used to be angry with the dealership. I used to rail against them, question their professionalism. I’ve even entertained the thoughts in my own head that perhaps the dealership is just simply incompetent and they can’t help themselves. Now I just find myself alternating between facepalm and headdesk when face to face with the dealership.
Somewhere deep down, with all this nebulous awfulness, you suspect that caring too much, being too involved will eventually make you sick. You start fantasizing about getting in your luxury car and never leaving it again. Never thinking about the sink trap, never thinking about the driveway, just losing yourself in the light-blue-and-smiles happiness of being inside your luxury car. That if you wait it out long enough in the utopia of your own making, that somehow the dealership won’t be there anymore and you can get out of the luxury car and start making progress again.
