WiFi and Brisket
The BBQ truck office
It turns out that being surrounded by a mountain range inundated with thunder storms is not optimal conditions for your WiFi connection. Our carrier is the most reliable in the area and it may be for PC’s but ours remain back home. Up here, we have only a laptop and a notebook. The story I intended for last week was just about finished but the screen kept freezing and I had to keep rebooting. My husband found himself either suddenly dropped or muted on important Zoom calls. Our next-door neighbor’s WiFi seemed to be working. He’s one of the community’s firemen and probably has all kinds of work-arounds. But, as you’d expect, I couldn’t get access.
Somehow, I heard that the parking lot of The Dollar General store a mile away on Route 17 was a reliable WiFi hotspot. It also happened to be next door to Big Kev’s BBQ truck which made it even more of a desirable place to set up an office. The Dollar General store’s parking lot was already crowded by the time we arrived. It was still raining, the air almost green with humidy, and many of the car doors were propped open. Laptops were perched on steering wheels, cups of coffee balanced on the dashboard. Someone had the radio on a soft Rock station.
You would think as I did that Big Kev’s BBQ parking lot had a lot more going for it as office space. There were picnic tables, a Port-a-Potty and fragrant smoke puffing out of the two flues of a large smoker under a lean-to next to Big Kev’s truck. But there was only one other car when we settled into a spot. The order window was open for business and would close when the last piece of meat was sold which often happened around 3 p.m. in the summer. But even now in the off-season it was iffy to not be standing in line by noon as it was now. Maybe the rain was good for some things. We got out of the car the same time the man in the other car did.
“I’m glad they’re open today,” he said. “I come back here once and they were closed. That was a bad day.”
His order filled several bags. Our order kind of outdid him: Futility and frustration are powerful reasons to be hungry. But then we were stuck with a new dilemma: how to devour all that food in the front seat of a car without dripping some onto our keyboards.
As a couple that takes pride in having sound priorities, we headed back to the house where we did a pretty good job of eating our way out of our irritated funk.
And, you know what? After spreading out all the containers, our phones dinged as they once more connected to the outside world and filled up with all the junk and messages we missed over the last couple of days. I didn’t ask my husband—he would not be disturbed from loading up his plate—but I realized that I simply did not have the bandwidth to finish any of the four drafts on my Substack dashboard. Battling him for equal portions from each container was saner, as was watching the clouds finally dissipate out the kitchen window.
I returned to Brooklyn late last night, once more ensconce in all things WiFi. But this episode underscored how much I miss the days when we connected with one another in person rather than through some skitzy wires.
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Oh No!! I shouldn't be your role model! My process is way crazier: idea and open sentence pops into my head and I set up initial draft, let it simmer until next day; come back, sees it sucks, shifts the text down an inch or two to keep it and repeat the first day's routine. I average doing this about 7 times through the week, cutting what sucks/pasting what does into the latest attempt, then when I think it may be ok, finally pasting the whole thing into a doc to edit better and refine it. I have a draft of another story that's currently a foot long and I still can't figure out what I'm trying to say! But I never, ever, go to the continue button to set up a post time because I really will goof and send out all that incoherent mess. Which is why I can only manage to do one story a week. But thank you for the vote of confidence, Nancy! Truly needed that!
“…this episode underscored how much I miss the days when we connected with one another in person rather than through some skitzy wires.” I can really relate to this. And that yummy brisket. Fun post!