Foul Mood — By Tommy Purser

I was in a foul mood Monday at the office here on Latimer. If you happened to have passed by, you may have heard my grumbling.
I was grumbling because I had no internet service when I arrived at the office Monday morning. I worked on those parts of the paper I can work on without internet service but that wasn’t much.
I thought about going home to work from there on my laptop but I discovered Mediacom’s problems had hit my neighborhood as well. Later, I learned that no Mediacom customer in Hazlehurst had any service.
After a while, I decided to go home and work off some of my anger in the yard. It didn’t much help.
At 4 a.m. Tuesday, I was awakened from a fitfull sleep to the realization that, maybe, while I slept, Mediacom had repaired the broken fiber optics cable I was told was causing the problem.
Sure, nuff. The internet was working again.
So I sat down with my laptop and worked for 4 hours before sleep unceremoniously interrupted my work …. until the good wife awakened from slumberland to make all sorts of annoying noises to awaken me once again.
After a while, I went to the office to begin work anew but shortly discovered that Mediacom was experiencing more problems, this time in an off again, on again, series of interruptions.
My foul mood shortly returned.
But, finally, I got the paper finished before nightfall arrived.
As aggravating as the lack of internet service was to me, it was really not much of a bother compared to the things that aggravated me 50-odd years ago.
The internet, email, computers, etc., have made my job exponentially easier today than was my job 53 years ago. It’s the same job, really, but modern technology has made the mechanics of newspapering much easier, much more exacting, and many times as efficient.
Now, however, politicians and politics in general are infinitely more difficult to deal with than I ever dreamed would be the case deçå∂´ßå©o [and therein lies another problem birthed by technology — I just typed “decades ago” and my computer interpreted that to be “deçå∂´ßå©o”].
And people, in general, are more difficult to deal with because the very internet that has so improved the nuts and bolts of weekly newspapering also brought along many negatives — social media, cable news, and internet wannabe journalists without the ethical standards that rule legitimate journalists.
And an alarming number of members of the public can’t tell the difference.
Oh, well. You have to take the bad with the good.