Even the robots are complaining now

Just got back from lunch, and had a message from Kathryn Fenner saying the blog was down. Again.

The message had come at 12:50, but by the time I saw it at 1:28, everything was OK.

I had similar complaints — along with others about folks having trouble sending me email — Monday. And I couldn’t call up the blog myself for a few minutes on Sunday.

Today, I even had a complaint from LinkedIn that it couldn’t send me emails. So even the robots are complaining.

First, sorry about the inconvenience, folks. Second, somebody’s trying to help me run this down. The tricky thing is, it’s almost always fixed before we look at it.

Please keep the complaints coming if you have trouble. If you can’t reach me at brad@bradwarthen.com, try brad@adcoideas.com. That seems to be working pretty steadily.

And again, I apologize for this thing that is NOT MY FAULT!…

15 thoughts on “Even the robots are complaining now

  1. bud

    Which brings up a very important philosophical question: At what point do all these interuptions beccome Brad’s fault? Its kind of like a woman who repeatidly gets beat up by her significant other. The first time it is definitely the guys fault (unless she hit first). The second time could be her fault if she had ample opportunity to leave or was otherwise ignoring warnings of a repeat. By the third time there is no doubt about fault. Any woman who stays in a relationship long enough for a third physical abuse event need look no further than the mirror to find who’s to blame. Not defending the violent SOB but seriously at some point a woman has to shoulder some blame.

    Same for Brad if the blog keeps going down. He needs to find a different avenue for blogging if this keeps happening.

  2. Brad

    Apparently, there’s something going on with Time- Warner and Commerce all over SE, affecting thousands of sites and email servers. All I know now…

  3. Mab

    Just an FYI — I have been having trouble accessing this blog via the new Google Chrome thing. Glad to know there’s an explanation other than that the FBI/CIA/… is “mirroring”* my computer. It always takes 2+ times of entering the web address to access this and many other blogs.

    * cue “Twilight Zone” theme song.

  4. `Kathryn Fenner

    @bud–you really need to read up on abuse before you say something like that again. It is nowhere near as simplistic as you seem to think it is. For one thing, domestic abuse doesn’t just happen where the abuser out of the blue hauls off and wallops the victim. There has been a systematic “brainwashing” first, often combined with social isolation of the victim. Gradually the victim is robbed of the victim’s confidence, self-esteem, personal power until the vicitm believes the victim cannot survive without the abuser and/or deserves the abuse.

  5. bud

    No one deserves abuse but sometimes folks need to woman up, be strong and face the situation in an intellectually honest manner rather than hiding behind the label of victim indefinitely. At what point do people lose there free will to act in a positive manner with respect to themselves. If abused women need help then we should provide it and government should fund it. But let’s not deny that women have to take some responsibility when they are repeatidly abused and fail to take the help that’s out there. No this is not simple but dang it at some point adults need to accept responsibility for their lot in life.

  6. Brad

    I have to disagree with Bud on this, but not because I agree with feminists. Quite the contrary, because I believe in chivalry. Sometimes women ARE the helpless victims of men, through no fault of their own, and need protection from such ogres. Just like in knight-errantry.

  7. bud

    I recall many times seeing women sucked into the spell of some “bad boy” persona while many really good and decent guys stayed in their dorm rooms on Saturday night playing board games. It was clear that the “bad boys” were trouble and likely to be abusive but the ladys somehow fell for their bravado and utter nonsense claims of how they would give them the world on a silver platter. Gag me with a spoon. Why do so many women fall for this crap?

    In the end my board game playing buddies ended up with nice women who understood what a true gentleman was. But in the meantime so many others were blinded by promises that were just too good to be true. The question of why this occurred is one of the great mysteries of life.

  8. Doug Ross

    @bud

    It’s sort of like sticking with Obama after he said he’d pull the troops out of Afghanistan and implement a single payer healthcare system, right?

  9. bud

    Chivalry? Seems a bit condescending to me. Are woman really so helpless that they have to be protected by men? Seems so 19th century to me.

  10. `Kathryn Fenner

    “At what point do people lose there free will to act in a positive manner with respect to themselves.”

    bud –that’s exactly what I was saying: abuse victims–some of whom are male–do in fact “lose their free will to act in a positive manner with respect to themselves.” They become unable to act through learned helplessness or simple intimidation. They may fear retaliation, and justifiably so.

    I personally don’t understand the attraction of the bad-boy–which doesn’t necessarily correspond to abusiveness–the head of the SEC back in the 80s was a wife-abuser, for example. My dad is a chess-playing, coin and stamp collecting astronomy-clubber, and I ended up, happily, with someone very similar. If my dad were vastly different from who he is, I very likely would not have ended up with such a stable person. We usually end up with someone a lot like one of our parents, often despite our best efforts. I was and am one of the very lucky ones!

  11. Brad

    19th century? How dare thou? Accuse ME of modernism? Have at thee, sirrah!

    But seriously, I’ll accept EARLY 19th century, but not later.

    As for not understanding “the attraction of the bad boy,” it’s generally understood as a crafty evolutionary strategy.

    Women go for the guys with extra testosterone, which means they are stronger, healthier, more likely to dominate and succeed in reproducing, so that their sons will have similar traits. Of course, such traits also mean the men are hyperaggressive and not likely to stick around to help raise the kids.

    So what women do — if they follow the more calculating demands of their genes — is sleep with the bad boys, and marry the nice guy. So that the nice guy can help raise the bad boy’s kids.

    You’re going to say that most women don’t act out that scenario, and perhaps you’re right. But that dynamic explains why women are ATTRACTED to the bad boys, even if they don’t hang with them.

    Y’all are going to laugh about this, but when my wife met me, I was working construction. I was a hardhat, and I was lean and hard and tanned like I’ve never been since. I wore faded jeans, plain white T-shirts (my favorite had a Leon Russell iron-on that I got in Myrtle Beach by walking into the shop, pulling off my shirt and telling them to iron it on right there — I assume the women swooned, but I wasn’t noticing). I had long hair and a mustache and mutton-chop sideburns.

    When she met me, she was immediately intrigued. She and I were both reading Kerouac at the time (it’s how we got to talking at the party where we met), and she thought I was some hip intellectual blue-collar guy, a latter-day Dean Moriarty.

    So she went out with me.

    Of course, as she will point out, she knew by the time she married me that her initial impression was WAY off.

    But I got the best of both worlds — the initial attraction thing, and her deciding I was a safe guy to marry.

    I’ve got a picture somewhere that goes with this story. I’ll post it later.

  12. `Kathryn Fenner

    ABUSE IS NOT ABOUT TESTOSTERONE!!!!

    Women can be abusers.

    Abuse is about control, not sex hormones or cavemen! Oy!

    Everyone needs to help victims escape and recover from abuse. Not just men.

    For this, I had to try how many times to get through the DNS?!?!?

  13. Steven Davis

    “while many really good and decent guys stayed in their dorm rooms on Saturday night playing board games”

    bud could write a book on what not to do in college, this would be up there in the top three.

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