Tech Issue and Orphan Trains

I had three annoying tech issues all in the same day chasing me like the hounds of Hades which is a bad metaphor to use here. Why? Because I'm not afraid of those hounds guarding the gate that keeps the walking dead from escaping the underworld. Armed with a couple of good steaks, I could outrun them. Ya, I know Halloween is over so it’s time to get the gruesome imagery out of my head and replace it with turkeys and pilgrims and wondering if cranberries will be safe to eat this year.

I’m quite sure if I had a grandson I would have called him to come over to rescue me from Tech Hell but since I don’t I had to call 1-800-fix-self, extension Jean. I started with my TV which was having a sound issue. I wasn't getting any. With the help of an online troubleshooting guide, I walked through three questions that if you answer ‘yes’ to any one of them you are dumpier than a stoner: Is the mute button on? Is the volume turned down? Are there earphones plugged into the TV? No, no and no. Next they asked: Did you unplug the cable box and plug it back in? Bingo! That did the trick, but inquiring minds want to know why that works on electronics and why can’t I ever remember to do it without reading it in a troubleshooting guide? And why didn’t I consult the troubleshooting guide before spending a half day of watching the TV in the kitchen while listening to the TV in living room with the volume jacked up high enough that it drove the dog out of his favorite chair? 

While the sound issue was going on I was trying to get my cap lock key on the computer fixed. It was stuck which is a serious matter if you go places that require cap sensitive passwords. That took me a half hour of digging gunk out from under my keys using the sticky end of a Post-it Note to capture hair, dead skins cells and dust. It’s like pealing sunburned skin, once you start cleaning one key you can’t stop until you’d done them all. But be forewarned, you’ll start wondering if it wouldn't be wise to wear a hairnet when you’re playing on the computer.

While I was digging gunk out from my keyboard I didn’t have enough common sense in my Technical Service Tool Belt to turn off my computer and I accidentally did something to my Firefox browser, causing it to lose all my bookmarks and worse yet, no way to bookmark new pages. Let me tell you, that was panic time here in the big city. But once again a Google search to find a way to fit the issue did the trick. But as much as I love Google I wish it would quit asking me to review the places I go. Ya I know, I can change the settings on my phone so GPS won't track my every move but it’s really a good safety feature for elderly people who might get lost and their kids need to find them before they run out of gas a hundred miles from where they were going.

One of the places I was asked to review was a continuum care complex where I went to hear a lecture, a fascinating lecture about the Orphan Trains (1854 to 1929). It was given by a woman who wrote four historical fiction books based on her research in a planned series of eighteen. I’ve read other authors who have written about the Orphan Trains but I hesitate to share this lady’s name because she’s self-published so I don’t know how well-written her books are. Her lecture, however was well done and covered the seventy-five years the orphan trains were a part of our history starting with how New York City came to have over 250,000 homeless children who were put on those trains going out west to find homes, and she ended her lecture talking about the social programs that were set up to help prevent having kids as young as four and five from living in the streets begging for pennies or bread and sleeping in doorways. Some of the photographs the lecturer shared of the street kids were heart breaking and while not all the kids found good homes in the towns along the train tracks it’s estimated that 87% of them did. 

One man, in particular, can be credited with setting up and financing the Orphan Trains. They were the brainchild of Charles Loring Brace, an ordained minister who dedicated his life to helping street kids plus thousands of babies left off at a Catholic nunnery in the middle of the night. Some people today are quick to bitch about social programs that help the poor (including Planned Parenthood)---calling them socialism and worst---but all we’ve got to do is look back at the world before we had those social welfare programs and ask ourselves if we really could turn a blind’s eye to the suffering that would go on without them.

My very first introduction to Orphan Trains was on a episode of Little House on the Prairie, if memory is serving me correctly. Either way, Orphan Trains are a well-documented part of our history and PBS did a program about them if you're interested in learning more. But there were also trains running to coal country in the same time frame that took foreign-born men and older boys from the over crowded city to work in the mines. My grandfather was on one of those "work recruitment" trains. ©

Tracking our Every Move and Mini Rant

A few days after my niece and I spent the afternoon in a tourist town along Lake Michigan, I got a questionnaire on my smart phone from Google Maps asking me about the restaurant where we ate lunch that afternoon. It creeped me out! I hadn’t googled a map to the area or looked for information about restaurant nor did I use a credit card or my phone inside the place. It took me a few minutes to figure out that GPS must have tracked us as we walked around town and it knew we stayed inside the restaurant long enough to eat. Creepy, but on the good side of Big Brotherism if I ever end up in a swallow, unmarked grave hopefully my killer will be the forgetful type who fails to take my cell phone and I’ll be found (assuming someone misses me before the battery ruins down). And even if he does disable my phone, I have an ace in the hole. My 5-Star Emergency Responder has the same GPS tracking ability and I’m never without that tucked in my cleavage. (Should it be ‘in’ my cleavage or ‘between’ my cleavage? I hate word dilemmas like that.)

There is precious little expectation for privacy these days and that’s sad for our youngest generation who will never know what it’s like to grow up in a world without security cameras, satellite spies and trackers recording their every move. They’ll never know the silly thrill of driving to a lookout point high above where two state lines meet and standing on a picnic table mooning the people going over the bridge below. Don and I did that once on vacation in the late ‘70s but if we did it today we’d probably get arrested for indecent exposure when we drove back down the hill. To the best of my memory that’s the one and only mooning episode in my life but if my brother or best friend through grade school and high school comes along to say differently I’ll bow to their superior memories. 

Did you know you can even get GPS pet trackers with location-on-demand? If Levi was an escape artist I’d get one for him in a heartbeat---might anyway because sometimes he's hard to find in the house. I’ve heard they can even embed similar devices under the skin of children of high profile people who might be targets for kidnappers. How soon before they become acceptable to use on all kids? Tracking devices for Alzheimer’s patients are not uncommon for those being cared for at home, and the 5-Star Emergency Responder I wear was originally designed for children by John Walsh, the father of the little boy who was kidnapped and beheaded in 1974. As most people know, John went on to establish a powerful advocacy group for victims of violent crime and is the host of the popular TV show, America’s Most Wanted. I admire how he was able to channel his deep grief into something for the greater good of society. 

Speaking of courageous fathers in the aftermath of profound loss did you see Khizr Khan’s speech at the DNC National Convention? He and his wife are Gold Star parents of a Muslim-American Caption in the U.S Army who was killed in Iraq and who posthumously received a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for his heroism. And if you want to skip the rant portion of this blog post, scroll down to the next paragraph. Here it goes: I cannot believe that Donald Trump tried to devalue that father’s impassioned speech about his son and anti-Muslim bigotry by claiming that Hillary’s people wrote it for him. It wasn’t enough for him to go after the father, he also suggested Mrs. Khan wasn’t allowed to speak as she stood on stage because of her religion. But Mrs. Khan the next day said in an interview that she gets emotional when she sees photos of her son and when she walked out on stage there was a huge image of him on the jumbo-trons and that threw her off balance so she asked her husband to speak for both of them. Instead of ignoring the whole speech as Trump should have done, he couldn’t resist hitting back on one line in particular: “Mr. Trump, you have sacrificed nothing and no one” for our country to which Trump shot back that he made a lot of sacrifices when he was building his business empire---as if that compares to having a child come back from war in a flag draped coffin. The man only takes his foot out of him mouth long enough to insert his other foot and he’s been doing this foot exchange over the Khan’s for nearly a week now. Rant off.

There is a TV commercial I see often for a smart phone app that is connected to a motion detector and speaker for your front door. It allows you to be able to see who is at your door and talk to them from any place in the world, whether they ring the bell or not. That app fascinates me which is plain crazy, given the fact that the only people who stop by are the UPS guy, USPS woman and the Jehovah Witnesses. Growing up, though, I would have set up that motion detector near my diary. Back in my teens I used sewing thread and baby power to alert me if any prying eyes had breached my hiding places. I was never sure if it was my mother or my brother who found my diary---more than once---because they were both too cagey to crack under my cross-examinations. In this day and age it would be so easy to catch someone who invades your privacy or to tell a Jehovah Witness at the door, “Move along little lady, move along.” ©

NOTE: If anyone missed Khizr Khan’s speech, check out this story about the son’s heroism which includes a link to video of his speech with its introduction by Hillary: Click Here.