Ctrl+Alt+Defeat
Windows Won, Park Didn't
Before the first real hour of work had even landed, I was already deep in the weeds of a fight nobody asked for. My home network needed a bit of routine maintenance, simple stuff, the kind of thing that should take twenty minutes and a coffee. Instead, Microsoft had other plans. First it was a PIN login my computer had quietly installed without my consent, a slick little maneuver that required twenty minutes just to undo. Then came the Microsoft account hostage situation, which I had to negotiate my way out of just to touch a scheduled task. Daylight saving time. That was the whole crime. Adjust a task to run on login instead of a schedule. Microsoft treated this like I was trying to disarm a nuclear warhead.
I got to work, opened the VPN. It spun. I waited. It spun more. I asked my team. They shrugged, which is the IT equivalent of “good luck with that.” I rebooted everything, logged out, restarted, did the digital equivalent of turning it off and on again three times in a row. The VPN came back, but wouldn’t connect. My team was fine. Their collective indifference settled over me like fog.
So I locked up the bike at the park and walked.
No agenda. No ticket to submit. Just grass, whatever birds were around, and the slow return of something resembling calm. I took some pictures. Stood still for a while. By the time things felt right again, the decision had already made itself: call in sick, take the day, go for the ride.
Some days the most productive thing you can do is recognize you’re already done. The park knew that before I did.
March 9th’s Wild Card
March 9th spans twenty years of adventures, from a wild Montana life list to broken spokes, lost cameras, fat bike climbs, and a camping hack. One quote from 2012 keeps threading through the years: sometimes you just have to hang your head out the window and enjoy the ride.
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