Missing Numbers

It’s been intensely November-like since Saturday afternoon: cold, overcast, drizzly, windy. On Sunday, it was so windy that I had to remove the big umbrella on the deck, which had been in the folded upright position for some time now, and store it in the garage. A gust of wind knocked it over, despite being folded, and it had taken the cast-iron table with it. Luckily, the whole mess didn’t move that far—not far enough to damage the big window looking out on the deck.

The wind also picked up the top of the plastic kiddie sandbox, which is shaped like a large flat frog, and flung it against the fence. No damage to the frog or fence, but it did look like the frog was trying to escape. Maybe he wanted to go south, but he too ended up in the garage. Been meaning to put the frog there a while.

Today I was at the computer a lot, gathering information in a way not possible when I started writing professionally 20+ years ago. But I’m so used to visiting web sites now for background (at least) that I’m hard pressed to remember what it was like to rely on the piles of paper on your desk for such information.

Not that the piles have gone away. Who would want them to? The paperless office, so loved by futurologists, would be something of a bad dream, I think.

I’m so used to on-line information that it’s annoying when a company or other entity with a web site omits something basic, such as, say, its phone number. I wanted to call a certain real estate company in Wisconsin recently, so I looked up its web site. The best such corporate sites have an address and phone number on the home page somewhere. Others put it in the “contact us” function. I don’t have any problem with that, except when the “contact us” button pulls up a form e-mail. That seems like the entrance to a black hole.

The Wisconsin real estate company's web site had various pages of worthless text about the merits of the company, but no address, no phone number. Don’t call us, please. Maybe six or seven years ago, when no one was sure that nut cases weren’t tolling the Web looking for numbers to call, that might have been understandable. But now? No excuse. I found the number anyway, but it remains a pet peeve.