Please Stand By


Today started out like any other day. Got up, took the dogs out, got ready for work, checked my email, watched the weather, kissed my husband goodbye and headed out the door to make my 8:00 start time. Today ended up a bit different than most.I drove up the usual road that I take to work and I noticed at a sharp bend in the road there was a stopped garbage truck.. It was a bit odd since there are no garbage pickups in that part of the road.. At first I did not think to much of it and just took care to stay out of the way. As I approached the side of the truck I realized that something terrible had happened.

Just behind the truck laying flat out and face up there was a middle aged man on the pavement. The garbage truck driver was just jumping out of his truck.. It seems the man who rides the back, and throws the garbage into the truck, some how fell off as the truck rounded the bend.

At first I slowed down not sure if I should stop since I really was not of any help in a situation such as this. I don’t even carry my cell phone.. I didn’t want to get in the way, but I felt in the looks of the situation it was not right to just drive on by while he lay in the road with only his friend there beside him..

I stopped the car, I don’t even think I shut it off, and went to see if I could help.. I went and stood over the man on the pavement while his friend who also was not carrying a cell phone went to call for emergency help. I watched close to make sure he was breathing. I felt bad because there was really nothing I could do. He was unconscious. I tried to see if he was awake by talking to him. But there was no response. I just watched helplessly, while reading of basic first aid and cpr ran through my head. All I could think of was not to let anyone move him cause he could have broke his back or neck falling that hard onto the pavement..

As I watched a small pool of blood had formed from the back of his head.. Whether it had been there the whole time, I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t seem to get any bigger.. If it had, I knew I had a clean beach towel in my car I could have used to try and put under his head to help stop the bleeding.. But again should I even move him that much. The things that run through your head when something like that it happening..

At first the driver ran to the ranger station right across from where we were, but they were not open yet so no one was there. I guess he had a radio in his truck as he ran back to the truck and within just a minute there were cars with sirens and police and other public works trucks coming from all directions. Though the man was breathing it was slow.. and he did have a strong pulse. One of the men that showed up from the ranger station garage thought he had stopped breathing and checked to make sure his airway was not blocked.. He gave him a couple breaths to make sure he was breathing seemed to get a bit better. This man also checked his pulse and agreed that his pulse was strong..

The blood pool from his head did not seem to get any larger in the few minutes I was there. Public works men who were his friends arrived and the police and volunteer guys, probably fire department guys, arrived and seemed to have everything under control..

I started to feel as though I had no business there anymore and that I might appear to the arriving emergency crew as a gawking spectator. So I got in my car and went to work. I wasn’t much help but I had done all I could do and needed to give them the space they needed to work.

I was concerned for the man but felt okay with everything till I got to work..

I sat down at my computer arriving just on time. I started trying to open up my same programs I have opened on my computer the last three years of my life. Only thing was, I couldn’t focus enough to even click on the links I needed to. I was having a major delay reaction.. My heart started pounding and I could not focus my mind. Suddenly I nearly started crying. There was no way I was able to deal with the public at that moment. I kept seeing his pale face and the pool of blood in my mind. Knowing I may never know if he was going to be okay. I didn’t even know his name.

I am one of those people that are good in a crisis but fall apart when it is over with. I started shaking and told a couple co-workers what had happened.. I went to try and find a supervisor to tell them it was going to be a few minutes till I could collect myself enough to answer the phones. But of course there was none to be found.

I sat for a few minutes to comprehend what had just happened. Trying to relax and to tell myself I had done all I could. I wished I could just go home.. I was, for a time, thinking about the mortality of things and how in a flash everything in a person’s life can change.. How within the few seconds it took for the driver of that truck to look back in his mirror and stop the truck, within only a few short feet, his life had changed. The man, his co-worker, his friend, lay on the ground, possibly dying. He had only a few moments before been doing his regular route throwing cans of trash into the back of the truck with possibly no cares in the world and with a twist of fate it had all changed.

As I collected myself and felt myself calm down enough that I was able to start up the programs on my computer, I knew I could take a bit more time if I needed it. I felt that the faster I got back to my job the faster I could just go back to focusing and put aside the events just past. The world doesn’t stop for tragedy.

I didn’t have trouble most of the day.. I didn’t try to sell things like I was supposed to I focused on just the necessities of fixing the customers problems to the best of my ability.. But every time I stopped either for break or lunch my thoughts were filled with concern for what was happening to the man. Did I do the right thing? Could I have done more? Should I have done nothing?

After work I went out for my usual Friday night-out dinner. I didn’t taste my food.. I don’t remember eating half of it.. Even now I feel a strange sort of numb feeling. Should I call the hospital and see if I can find out any information? What would I tell them? I didn’t have a name. I’m not related. Again, helpless to the feelings.

So instead, like any writer I put the thoughts down on paper (computer screen) to help work through them. I have to resign myself to the thoughts that for the few minutes I was there. And his friend didn’t have to leave him lying there alone behind a garbage truck as he went to find help. And even in that little way, I think I did the right thing… just standing by.

categories General | | datetime September 21, 2007 10:51 pm | comments Comments (0)

Adding Sense To It All

There was a time when you could go to a search engine and get the information you wanted first try. This was the time when Google was really the top of the line for the internet savvy. You could find anything you wanted.

It was a time when you submitted your site to a search engine and they checked it for content to decide if you were good enough to add to their search engine. If you were lucky enough to get approved for their engine you would be easily found and would be assured plenty of visitors.

It wasn’t just google.. All search engines were by submission only. You had to sometimes wait 6 weeks or so to be added. But it was worth the wait to see your site show up under the search terms from your meta tags and content. In those days my site grew from a small one person site to hundreds and thousands of pages of poems…

DreamersReality.com got so many hits I could not keep up with the old hand written html coding I was doing on the poems. I was getting sometime a couple dozen poem submissions a day. With the onslaught of visitors I had to have the help of a friend to switch the working of my site to a more workable and timesaving database form.

That seems to be where things changed. About the time I finished getting my site upgraded to be able to handle all the flow of new talented writers Google made a change..The added Adsense to the scene.

The original reason I created my site was so that I didn’t have to have ads on my site taking away from the content. So the writing on the site would be the centerpiece of the site, not some unsightly ad for some other company. So I did not evolve into putting junk ads all over my site.. I had offers from time to time to time from the online casinos and other places. It was due to  havingt I has such high traffic stats on my site.

But times were changing.. For some reason when I changed over to my data bases even though I had a redirect to the new pages, Google decided it no longer thought this top ten website was worth promoting.. Could it have been because I did not choose to add their ads to my site to junk it up with commercialism hoping to make a buck.

It seems that it was not just my site that had these things happen.. It is harder and harder to find a site with real content these days. You have to weed through all the sites, (and I use that term loosely) that  have nothing but ads and links to other sites. Some with no content on them at all; just other links to more non-content sites. So you go back to Google and look for the next link that seems to have the content you are looking for, Then what do you get? A front page locked into “you are not a member you must first register before you can view this site”..

One incidence, when I was checking to see if anyone was linking to me, one site had taken one of my poems without permission from my site and put on their own.  I could tell due to the words from the beginning of my poem were in the search description.. When I clicked on the link it took me to a site that was an ad for a book that had a collection of poetry on it.. What?? not only could I not get in to see where my poems were being used and advertised in the search engine, but they were using them to make a profit too. Was there a contact link? Nope just a page with links and ads on them.. Maybe it was a scam to get money out of concerned writers. And maybe it was just a draw to get you to click on their link.

Was the site only using the content of my poem because it had gotten so many hits on my webpage that by using the beginning of my poem they were hoping to get hits on their ads and get their ranking higher.. Well they achieved both. Their site with my website name and the beginning of my poem was ranked higher in the search engines than mine with the original open and viewable content.. Of course they had plenty of Google Adsense on their site. Tell me is there something wrong with that or is it just me?

This is happening with lots of sites. Every time I go to search for something I find this same misdirection happening.. The search engine description looks like it has the content only to get there and find usually none at all or a bunch of random writing that makes no sense or a page full of clickable ads, with no content at all.

Hard to believe these are the top 10 sites on the Google search engine now. But they are..

I can find many more of my content rich pages.listed on Yahoo and Ask.com. even Msn beat out Google. And actually Ask.com, the little guy in the race has the most pages of my website linked in. I find it much easier to find what I am looking for on the not so popular search engines.

I have tried to play some of the games Google has designed. I made a robots site map, and loaded it to their sitemap page.. I deliberately left out the pages from a near dead portion of my site forum.. Do you think it helped? Not a bit. I was later told that if I removed the, now near, useless meta tags that would help.. nope.. that didn’t help either.

One day I got excited I seen that Google has spidered my site and added a couple hundred pages of my site.. So I went to see what was added. And would you believe it was the pages I wanted ignored from the old forum. Not the content from the site.. Not any of the 6000 + poems.. Just forum chit chat of no real relevance except to the friends that once frequented the site years ago.

A friend of mine decided to give adsense a try.. and in the last year he has make maybe $5 dollars. Woo Hoo.. I guess you have to be a abuser of the technology in order to make any real money. Sorry it’s not for me.

I have pretty much given up on Google.. I rarely use them for any searches anymore. I want content, not ads to waste my time.. When I am searching, I want to search, find, and get on with my day..

Google has turned into a big time wasting search engine full of so much gobbly goop with all that adsense it has forgotten that as a search engine it needs to focus on the search outcome quality….

But then that would… add sense .

categories Commentaries, Rants | | datetime 1:11 am | comments Comments (0)

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