Anne Lamott said “almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes. Including you.” So I am unplugging for the next week. At least, I am unplugging from email – and job stuff. But I know important email messages will find their way to my inbox during that time – though they will surely be swamped in a deluge of other message I will be no worse off for not seeing. For the folks who send me important stuff, I can offer an out of office message to let them know why they won’t hear back from me for a while. But I couldn’t help offering a little commentary in the process. So if you send me an email from within the NDUS system in the coming days, you will get a auto-reply that reads:
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TLDR: I’m out of the office and will not be checking email until June 22.
In the days before the interwebs, when Bozeman was a relaxed little
college town serviced by only 2 freeway exits – when residents’ priorities were
epitomized by a green light on the Baxter hotel, which was illuminated when
fresh powder appeared at Bridger – there was an electronics store in the heart
of its old downtown. Not a consumer products store with radios or
televisions or anything like that. A proper electronic components
store. One that made radio shack seem laughably paltry. It was like
an old-timey hardware store. Aisle after aisle, shelves were meticulously
laid-out with plastic bins, hand labeled with part numbers. But instead
of nuts, bolts, or tenpennies, the bins were filled with transistors, relays,
capacitors, and such.
More glorious, even, than the possibilities shelved in that little shop,
was the owner’s orientation to scheduling. The hours posted on the door
said it usually opened after lunch and closed in time for dinner. And
(this is the part that seems most characteristic of the town Bozeman used to
be) occasionally customers would arrive on a weekday to find the store dark
inside, with a sign on the locked door reading “not gone fishing, just
gone.” I don’t remember anyone complaining about that. It was the
kind of eccentricity people in the west accepted – even admired. And it
was part of the identity of old Bozeman.
I never got the sense that people in old Bozeman were particularly health
conscious – but they were healthy. There was, for example, a group of
runners who participated in all of the long distance runs in the area –
including ones up and down mountains. The Silver Foxes was the name of
their club and their average age was somewhere in the 90s. Several silver
foxes were former faculty members at MSU.
I didn’t get to properly experience much of old Bozeman. Within a
couple weeks of my arrival, firmly in the middle of the 1990s, a third freeway
exit came into service – which seemed to herald a new consumerism, whose
expanded accessibility soon put an end to specialty shops like the old
electronics store. Soon, big-box and online stores eliminated the need to
wait for local shops to open. And Increased accessibility to parts, came
with increased access to people. We no longer have to wait for a shop’s
proprietor to open the doors in order to get the part we need for the thing we
are making. Nor do we have to wait to speak to a person directly to ask
for a thing we want.
The world seems to move a lot faster now. On balance, maybe that’s
a good thing. Or maybe it’s not. I don’t know. Perhaps
contemporary access is the sunny side of impatience. At the moment, I
don’t really care to worry about it though. All I really wanted to do
here is provide a little context for this out of office message, because:
I’m not gone fishing. I’m just gone.
Regards!
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