GMail has apparently “locked down” my email address due to “unusual usage”.

The listed about six things or so that I might have done to incur the wrath of the GMail gods. Of course I am doing none of them. I am not doing anything that I haven’t been doing since I signed on. It won’t even tell me what it thinks that I’m doing.

It says that it may take up to 24 hours to regain access. Email is not something to be messed with like this.

Holy cow am I pissed off. It took a long time to get back confidence in free email providers, but GMail managed to do it. Now maybe I’m going to have to figure something else out.

My coworker Pat is, not unlike a number of my techie coworkers, the tech support for her extended family. Just about any time she goes back home to Apalachia, she is given something to work on and her reward is that whenever a computer is replaced she gets the defective one to repair and use herself. It’s low pay for the hours of support she provides, but family is family.

One such defective computer used to be the computers of her nephew and niece, both under the care of their grandparents, here parents. Once she resurrected the computer she found a bunch of old chatlogs that she couldn’t help but wade through out of morbid curiosity. Unsurprisingly, since both Cali and Carll are in high school, most of the conversations are pretty asinine. Carll takes mostly after his father who was something of a nimrod, so most of his chatlogs are both dull and stupid. Cali, on the other hand, got her mother’s intelligence (but, thankfully, not her propensity for poor lifestyle choices). But alas, she is seventeen and all which that entails.

Cali is dating some guy named Mark and so unsurprisingly they’re trading IM’s often. Reading through the logs (which Pat knows she shouldn’t do but she is a curious cat without much of a life of her own) gives Pat a headache. Cali and Mark are always arguing over something stupid. She’ll get mad at him for not responding to her IM even though the timestamp reads only thirty seconds before. Cali is angry at Mark most of the time and Mark, who seems like a nice enough guy but is probably not the sharpest tool in the shed) is pretty clueless why. Then he’s mad at her, she’ll talk circles around him and explain why he’s wrong, and he won’t be able to keep up with her logic and will just get madder.

Cali also trades messages with a friend of Mark’s Brad. The remarkable thing about those messages is that they’re never bickering. She’s never mad and he’s never defensive. He doesn’t get mad and he actually articulates why Mark is upset better than Mark does and he seems to understand why she’s mad at him when she is. Brad is dating some girl named Marta, with whom he is always fighting.

“I just don’t understand why Cali and Brad don’t just get together,” Pat said.

“Because if they did, Brad and Cali would have to start bickering and huffing and puffing and sobbing the way that Brad and Marta and Cali and Mark do in their relationships.”

“I’ll never understand young people.”

I’ve been a bad boy. I managed to get my car and driver’s license registered in Estacado a while back, but only yesterday did I finally move my auto insurance. I’ve been paying lower Deseret rates and was running the risk of not being adequately covered if I’d gotten into an accident. My new agent, however, assured me that they would have covered me regardless. That’s really good to know.

We’d been intending to get married-couple auto insurance, but procrastination has gotten the better of us (just as it has with our separate bank accounts). Anyhow, no more. Estacado law apparently requires us to register together. It’s apparently a community property issue! Without a legal separation we are apparently forbidden from denying access to our cars from one another. Because we have to be able to drive one another’s cars, we have to be insured to. So we have to be registered together.

The good news is that I have been with my carrier for a very long time and I am subject to all sorts of discounts. Clancy is covered by that money saving Gecko. She has been inclined to shop around, but I’ve always gotten very good service from State Farm and am inclined to pay 10-15% more to go with the known quantity. With my discount, I may not even be paying more. At the very least my renter’s insurance history makes me ligable for a 20% discount for homeowners when we buy a home. I don’t often get the impression of being a “valuable customer”, but I do get that impression from each of the agents I’ve dealt with. The fact that my family has been covered by them since 1972 actually seems to count for something.

There was one oddity, however. Apparently according to the driving record they have I was in an automobile accident in 2004. I am almost certain that was not in an automobile accident in 2004. I don’t believe I ever got into one in Deseret, either reported or otherwise. Unfortunately the record didn’t have any details. My new agent struck it from my record, though, along with a 2003 ticket (didn’t matter, I was already eligible for safe driver’s discount). I just don’t know why my record would report me in an accident I am 90% sure I was not involved in.

—-

Speaking of cars, I am considering getting the lock changed on my car. Right now I am keeping valuables out of the car and keeping it unlocked because of the hassle of the current configuration. Essentially I do not have a key to the lock of my driver’s side door, meaning I either have to reach across the car to unlock it or I have to spin in from the passenger’s side door. That’s more of a hassle to do than you might realize. So I don’t leave anything in the car that I’m worried about being taken. But after the last break-in I still find myself worried that someone is going to break in and take my car stereo sans the faceplate. Since faceplate replacement is so expensive that it would negate the pawn value of the radio itself, I don’t know why they would, but I still find myself concerned.

I talked to The Worthless Dealership about replacing the locks on the car. They quoted me at about $300, which was pretty excessive. So I’m thinking about replacing only the driver’s side door and keeping two keys on me. I think next time a lock on my car breaks, I’m just going to get it replaced on the spot rather than spend years making it a hassle to lock my car.

I wonder who else I could get to do it other than The Worthless Dealership, though.

On the other hand, a locked car in Colosse usually just meant a broken window. So what’s the point, again?

-{Note, due to a mishap on my part, this post temporarily disappeared. So if you saw that, you’re not crazy}-

This is one of the more impressive videos that I’ve seen in a while. A guy reproducing the Mona Lisa using MS Paint.

The most impressive part to me is how quickly he knocked down the meadows in the background.

Keeping up with the posts on SoTech, I thought I’d offer a quick primer on the dorms they have as such.

First up, we have The Polyhedron. The Polyhedron was built first on SoTech’s campus, back in the 50s. Despite this, it’s probably (overall) the most well-kept of the lot. Solid metal-and-concrete construction, large block exteriors, thick walls, good A/C and ventilation. It’s in The Polyhedron that Greenwood Hall (the Honors dorm that Will and I were in for most of our stays), Lecter Hall, Dredd Hall, Bruno Hall, and Grayson Hall are located. In the normal course of things, Greenwood Hall and Dredd Hall are for Honors students, Bruno Hall is where most of the Assletes (and regrettably, the 1st floor accomodations for handicapped accessibility) are located, and Grayson Hall and Lecter Hall are reserved for the rest who don’t get into a specific one. The rest of the “student athlete” population tends to be in Lecter Hall because Grayson is a 24-hour noise-free zone, something they wouldn’t likely understand or want to be in. During the summers, most of The Polyhedron is turned into paid locations for summer camps, High School Jailbait Cheerleading Camp, and other such events.

Every couple years, they try to “clean” the walls of The Polyhedron, to turn them back to their “natural” coloration. The true natural coloration, however, is Stone Gray. It gets back that way pretty quickly in Colosse’s weather.

The second, and largest-capacity, student housing setup is Sauron Center. Sauron Center is approximately 17 or 18 floors high, and was built in the 70s. It’s more run down than The Polyhedron, the elevators rarely work, and on at least two occasions has been flooded from the top floors downward when some idiot tried to hang their clothing from the emergency fire sprinklers. Sauron Center has another rare feature: students are gender-separated not by suite, but by floor, due to the community bathroom/shower setup.

The third location, built in the early ’80s, is SoTech Plaza. SoTech Plaza is a set of two-story “apartment” setups, with single-person rooms sharing a bathroom. The good news is, you get your own bathroom. The bad news is: everything else. A/C is provided by loud, badly maintained window units, the walls are paper-thin, the metal skeletons are starting to buckle. SoTech Plaza was originally supposed to be a “temporary” setup until newer places were built, at which point it was supposed to be torn down and replaced with a real building, but SoTech are cheap that way and seem to intend to try to patch it until one of the buildings collapses on someone’s head.

The Pines is the fourth location. This was put up in the early 90s, and is what was supposed to replace SoTech Plaza, except that money became tight and they handed the reins over to a private management company to run it as apartments for a while. They got it back about half a decade ago, and seem to be running it about the same as SoTech Plaza now.

Finally, there’s The Forest and The Wood, the two newest ones. Almost brand spanking new, but put up and advertised more as places for the Frat/Sorority types to go than anything for the main student body, because Frat Row is slowly being torn down. They follow much the same philosophy as The Pines, being set up more as apartment complexes (which allow people to remain over summer even if they’re not registered for summer classes) than dorms.

For obvious reasons, Sauron Center is the most inexpensive to live in, and The Forest and The Trees are the most expensive. For those on scholarship, Greenwood is still the place to be.

Web’s post on his experiences with athletes and housing reminds me of my freshman year, which Hugh and I spent in Lecter Hall, the “Athletics Dorm” before moving to Greenwood Hall, the “Honors Dorm”.

For the most part it actually wasn’t that bad. Fortunately for Hugh and I we had one another to room with so we only had to deal with suitemates, who weren’t all that bad all things considered. But even so it was always very… loud. Music was always blaring at volumes that we never experienced in Greenwood. And athletes in general are more loud and rambunctious in their behavior than are honors students or even regular college students.

The worst we ever had was actually with a couple of female athletes across the hall. One of the two was a somewhat quiet, studious sort that defied stereotypes and her roommate was a very loud one that conformed to some rather unfortunate stereotypes about African-American women. I don’t know if the two got along generally or not, but I do know that exams were more than they could bear.

Well, more than the quiet one could. Frustrated with the loudmouth’s lack of an “off switch” the quiet one locked her out of her own dorm. At two in the morning this did not go over well either with the loudmouth or with anyone else on the floor. Studious said that she needed to study and Loudmouth said that she needed to sleep. Studious pointed out that Loudmouth never actually seemed to sleep and therefore was suspicious of that rationale for her to be allowed back into the dorm. Loudmouth disagreed with that assessment and simultaneously compared her to a female dog and a vagina, among other things.

This eventually culminated in the UPD* campus police being called. When they arrived the officer and the loudmouth played a game of “Opposite!”

For instance, the loudmouth would say “Oh my god, you did *not* just tell me to be quiet!” by which we ascertained that the police officer had in fact told her the be quiet. The loudmouth said “You did *not* just force me back on the bed” by which she meant that he had, in fact, physically prevented her from standing up. The climax of the game came when she said “Oh, my god, you did *not* just put handcuffs on me!” and “I am *not* going to put up with this” which meant “You just put handcuffs on me” and “Okay, fine, I’ll calm down” respectively.

The whole thing took a couple of hours. I suppose if this is the worst story I have in Lecter Hall it wasn’t too bad. The worst part about it was the social isolation, really, and constant stream of bass coming from one dorm or another at any given time. On the upshot my suitemate left a primo shirt. I tracked one of the suitemates down the following year. He said that the shirt wasn’t his and the guy he roomed with was in jail. So finders, keepers, I still have that shirt today.

* – Presumably they would shorten the name of the police department and drop the “Southern Tech” from it lest Southern Tech University Police Department be shortened to STUPD.

Picture: Ryoga holding a bottle of Vodka, taken in the Summer of 2001.

One of the most frustrating aspects of car ownership is knowing when it’s time to turn it in and get a new one. Many of us form at least some sort of bond with our automobile, but even if we don’t most of us don’t replace a car the first time there is a serious problem. If the cost to fix a car is more than the cost of a new one the choice is simple. But if a new car is eight thousand and the repair bill is five, is it worth it? There are so many factors that it’s difficult to say much of the time.

Even if you fix the car something else may well come down in a few months and you’ve paid more to have the car fixed than it would have cost to replace it. But if nothing is going to go wrong then it feels wasteful to replace it willy-nilly like that.

My car is fine (knock on wood) but I’ve been running into that question with one of my computers with some urgency for weeks and I’ve been battling the question with the little guy for years. In early 2002 over the span of a couple months I bought two computers, Mousse and Ryoga, of almost identical quality with the latter being just a touch faster. But my experiences with the computers have been anything but identical. Mousse has worked nearly flawlessly. The only time I’ve had real trouble with it is when I’m having to mess with it doing some part diagnostic testing for some other computer, usually it’s twin. Ryoga has gone through three cases/power supplies and has eaten up four sticks of RAM over the past five years or so (most of the RAM was pretty old, though) and I’ve probably had to spend three or four hundred hours simply trying to figure out what the problem is with it this time and trying to get it fixed.

-{If you don’t know or care about technical things, you should probably skip over the next four paragraphs and resume reading where noted}-

The problem has been ramped up over the past couple of months when I took Ryoga off of fileserver duty and put it onto general desktop use. The first problem I had was that it would not recognize the 300GB HD that I was putting into it even though that same drive was moved over from the fileserver. It took a few days of after-work care trying to figure out how to get it to recognize the drive. I ultimately installed some jacked up version of Windows and got it working. A week later it started shutting down randomly. After a few days of investigation I determined the problem to be a power supply (even though the power supply it had should have had ample wattage). I replaced the power supply and it started working again.

A week after that the apartment was consumed with the smell of burnt plastic. I isolated the smell to the computer, which had frozen. Actually it hadn’t “frozen” so much as overheated. I don’t know how hot it got but after I let it cool down for five minutes and booted it up it was registering at 118 degrees Celsius. The video card died in the process and the computer was down for over a week for fear of starting a fire. I downloaded the Motherboard Monitor so that I could keep an eye on the temperature and finally got enough faith to get it going again and for most of last week it was overing between 80 and 105 degrees, well above where you want it to be but safe enough to sleep at night.

Then a couple days ago the temperature was registering at 124 degrees. It was still functional I shut it down for a while to let it cool off. When I rebooted one of the hard drives failed. I booted it using Knoppix and the 300GB data drive was in-tact, which it was, and Knoppix did some automatic diagnostic on the harddrive that fixed the hard drive and it was able to boot back into Windows. Unfortunately the case fan seems to be sputtering. The CPU temperature is reading between 100-110 degrees more than I would like, but for the most part it’s settling in the 80-100 range.

I can’t imagine the computer has that much life in it, but it’s been hobbling along in one form or another since it was less than a year old. Nevermind the inconvenience, if it eats anymore hardware then the “repair” bill will far exceed what it would cost me now to replace it. Of course if I replace it after it does eat more hardware, I’ll have to replace not only the computer but the hardware that it kills, too. Additionally if I want to replace it cheaply now would be a better time than a couple years from now. I can probably track down motherboard-processor that has the right slots (AGP and DDR) for my current hardware. A year from now would probably require the purchase of an additional video card and RAM. And I just bought the video card to replace the one it just killed!

-{If computers ain’t your thing, continue reading here}-

The logical part of my brain says that it’s time to bury Ryoga and buy a new processor. A new mobo/processor would cost about $150 and replacing so much as a dead harddrive could cost as much as $140 (nevermind the inconvenience of lost data). But I am extremely reluctant to do it for a couple of reasons.

Primarily I hate to waste. I don’t like the idea of throwing away a computer that works without incident 95% of the time. I was so excited when I last rearranged my computer setup because for the first time in a long time I had use for every computer I have. Nothing was going to waste! It was a wonderful feeling that lasted a week until Ryoga began acting up. I just don’t want to throw away something that works just like I don’t want to retire a car that can still be driven.

But also I’ve formed a bond with it. It’s been with me a very long time and letting it go would mostly close a big chapter in my computing experience. I still have Mousse, but that’s Clancy’s computer so I don’t get to use it very much. Just a few weeks ago I had Ryoga, born in 2001, running a video card born in 1999 and a sound card born in 2000. I took pride in Ryoga’s spry ability to just continue to chug along with my newer and more glamorous machines. If Ryoga were to just die I’d understand it and move on. But instead he continues to just barely chug along, demanding that I euthanize him.

As Will’s noted before, we both attended Southern Tech. I, upon my graduation, found employment at my alma mater, something I continue to this day. It’s something of a feeling of giving back, something of a rewarding experience (with one or two exceptions, the co-workers are fantastic), and government jobs are always good for job security.

One of the more interesting thing about my position is that it allows me to keep an eye on the student body. My department features a number of degree plans, one of which seems to have none of the graduate-degree potential of the others; I like to call this one “Future Gym Teachers of America.” Whereas most of the other degree plans are dominated by bright kids, this one has the singular distinction of being the home of roughly 50% of the high-profile NCAA athletes for the school. I say “athletes”, but we have a slang term as well, especially come the end of semester and class registration time: “Assletes.”

When I was in the dorms, Will and I had a common friend in Karl. Karl’s troubles with this crowd started early. Southern Tech’s system of assigning roommates is affectionately known as “Roommate Russian Roulette”: they have NO overhead for people to shuffle around, they routinely overbook by 10-20% so that people spend the first couple weeks (or worse) living on cots in the common areas, and in some cases they’ve actually quartered students at another university in another part of town, and bussed them back and forth from there to campus. Getting a roommate transfer (even in conditions where items have been stolen or personal property destroyed) is a matter not of convincing them it’s warranted, but of convincing someone else to trade off in another room.

Karl’s original housing was in the worst section of the dorms, and they gave him an “Asslete” for a roommate; this person ran a nighttime barber business out of their dorm room, and Karl was rightly afraid that the “clients” would walk off with his possessions. This had a highly negative effect on Karl’s studies, but fortunately didn’t last long enough to give him too major of a problem.

When Karl managed (a couple months later) to transfer into the better dorms by moving into the room next door as my suitemate, his studies noticeably improved, because he was able to be in his room with his books and study. This lasted for approximately 1 and a half years.

Then, the housing authority “mysteriously lost” his housing re-signing documents, after cashing his deposit check. They stuck another less-savory individual in Karl’s slot, and moved him to the worst dorm in the place – a dorm known informally as the “Athletics Dorm” but more often referred to in a derogatory reference to a famous movie serial killer the dorm might have been named after. He was shoehorned into a three-person suite, the two others in the place being some of the worst, and yet somehow most representative, examples the Athletics program ever had to offer.

The idea of “College” for Assletes in the Athletics dorm was late-night parties, beer, and skanky girls; basically, it was impossible for Karl to even be in the room, let alone study. He took to spending most of his time in Hugh and Will’s suite, but not managing to study (because his books were in his own room and he usually didn’t want to go back to risk confrontation long enough to get them); at least half the time he crashed on a friend’s floor in our building, because one of their drunken friends was sleeping off their latest binge on his bed, or they were having other “things” going on in the room. At one point, they stole his backpack and one of them toted around a non-house-trained puppy for two days in it, then handed him back his (now thoroughly urine-soaked and beyond salvation) bag without even an apology for the damage.

Regrettably, this was common behavior of student athletes, at least of the high-profile ones. Oddly enough, there was (and remains) an inverse relationship between athletic scholarships and athletic achievement; the brighter the kid, the better grades they made, the more likely they hadn’t gotten an athletic scholarship at all.

Every semester, my department deals with at least 4-5 (this past fall it hit double digits) disciplinary actions concerning cheating on tests. Every semester, all but 1 involves one of the “Assletes.” We’ve had security-camera proof of some of these, and it boggles the mind that they think they’d get away with it.

Every semester as well, a good number of professors get phone calls from the Athletics department concerning team members who are about to fail a class, demanding they be given a minimum grade (usually “C”) or else an “Incomplete” so as not to screw their GPA and fall below eligibility guidelines. These aren’t kids who missed class due to road trips representing the school, but simply kids who couldn’t be bothered to show up for their classes, or do their homework, or their projects, and in some cases who didn’t bother to show up for their finals.

Every semester, the Assletes converge upon the Academic Advisors. The name of the position is not a coincidence: the purpose of Advisors is to give ADVICE, to recommend what courses they take, doublecheck their GPA and recommend they retake something if they didn’t understand it, and make sure they are nominally on-track to graduate when appropriate. The Assletes are given a preferential sign-up time to register for classes that actually (these days) begins before the Honors students. They are given the tools to make sure they have the exact schedule they want, to schedule around their daily practices and whatever else they need. Yet every year, they show up and insist that the Advisors, rather than fulfilling an Advisor role, do it all for them.

It always amazes me how it turns out this way. The largest list of these comes from three teams: Football, Men’s Basketball, and Women’s Basketball. We do not (as a general rule, with only the occasional exception) get these from Soccer, or Volleyball, or Golf, or Swimming, or any of the other sports, but at least a sizable minority of the “scholarship” students from those three seem to think they are entitled to a college degree without ever lifting a finger or exercising a brain cell working for it.

What do you get when you take Two Guys, A Girl, And A Pizza Place and get rid of the Pizza Place? Two Guys and a Girl.

What do you get when you take Two Guys and a Girl and add two more girls and a guy? Two Guys and a Girl still.

The biggest strength and weakness of the Two Guys and a Girl (and a Pizza Place) television show is in its name. Television shows rarely change their name midway through because doing so is confusing and typically bad for ratings*. In the case of this series it was emblematic of a larger problem in that the show did not know what it was about. It originally set itself up as a cross between Friends and Cheers but found the former element worth keeping and by the end of the second season everyone who worked at the pizza joint quit. Then, finding a three-person cast to be a bit light, they kept adding them one at a time until they numbered six.

But what I really enjoyed most about the show comes right back down to the name and the name change. It was a rare experience of a television show that simply evolved of its own accord. Most of the time when changes rock a television show it’s to resurrect sagging ratings. They’ll add another cute kid or two characters that have been playing footsie since the show’s inception will end up getting together. These changes usually come after long periods of stasis. Two Guys and a Girl, on the other hand, continued to evolve on its own accord. They didn’t implant star-power** or a cute kid but rather humorous and interesting characters for the existing characters to interact with.

If you don’t like sitcoms this is not the show for you. It never stops striding for a laugh at the expense of realism and character empathy. Even when I wasn’t laughing at the joke I had fun watching them all try. In fact, the show was at its weakest when it was trying to get me to care about the characters. It succeeded, but only just. They honestly could have skipped most of the scenes where those characters that get together do so and I’m not sure anything substantial would have been lost. To an extent I think the writers knew this because they narrowly dodged climatic confrontations wherein characters express their undying love in a way that you don’t want to laugh at them.

If you didn’t like Friends because it was too unrealistic, you’ll hate this show. If you didn’t like Friends because it was too self-important, you might want to give it a shot if you haven’t already. It is on the WE network in reruns, or was last I checked.

* The only other TV show with a name change that I can recall was Valerie, which was renamed The Hogan Family when Valerie Harper left the show.

** There are only two examples. Tiffani Thiessen of Saved By The Bell fame was on for a little while, but she wasn’t a regular castmember or a Heather Locklear “special guest”***. She was simply there. The other is some Boston Red Sox shortstop that actually made a couple of appearances as himself dating one of the show’s regulars.

*** – Heather Locklear was billed as a “special guest” for something like eight seasons on Melrose Place. Most regular castmembers weren’t around as long as she was.

We’ve determined that the 18-22 is way, way too young to be married. There is definitely some truth to this insofar as the way the system is set up now. Most 18-22 year olds have yet to take responsibilities for themselves so it seems insane to expect them to take responsibility for a family. But part of the reason that we’re not ready at 20 is that we’ve not been expected to take responsibilities and we’ve provided a plethora of excuses if our responsibilities don’t work out. After all, we don’t expect marriages to work out between 19 year olds and so when they don’t it’s not a surprise.

Statistically speaking, Deseret has a pretty average divorce rate. Considering how important marriage and family is to the Mormon Church this may sound underwhelming. And perhaps it is. On the other hand, they maintain their average divorce rate despite the fact that an abnormally high number of their marriages are within groups that shouldn’t make it. Young couples, couples still in college, couples with little work experience and a less thorough dating experience than I saw back in Delosa. I haven’t looked at the facts and figured but I suspect if you compare the demographics, Deseret would come out very favorably. Why? Because Deseretians and Mormons expect their kids to be able to handle marriage at a young age. They demand it, at least more than most churches do when the rubber hits the road.

Of course, I think about my own life and experiences and it doesn’t wash. If expected to, I probably would have married and settled down with Julie. The thought of that these days sends shivers down my spine. The darkness I felt in that final year was our destiny and as time passed it got better and not worse. On the other hand, if it had been expected of me maybe I would have found ways to make it work. A couple of pregnancy scares have left me debating the issue for stretches when I haven’t had a lot of other things to think about.

Maybe I could have risen to the occasion. Maybe, if we’d been Mormons or good Catholics or from a culture where young marriage was encouraged or demanded. But it seems that the most spectacular of my not-huge (or at least I like to think not-huge) collection of failures and missteps have stemmed from a desire to rise to an occasion and be someone that I am not or fill a role that I am not the person to fill.

Yet when I think about concerns of identity, who I really am and what I am meant to do, I am left to wonder: aren’t these questions the frivolous spiritual tedium of the citizens of a wealthy nation? Throughout history it’s pretty rare that a people get to have so much control over their destiny. Has it served us that well? Might we be better off in conscription to service to family, god, and country? As miserable as I think I might have been with Julie, most of the married Mormon couples I know seem to be relatively happy. Even or especially compared to marriages between those people that have the idle time to consider what it means to be who they are.

By my observation, the more concerned a person seems to be with such questions the less happy they are. Are they searching for these answers because they’re unhappy or are they unhappy because they spend their time and energy looking for these answers?