A tale of woe.

Is that Cyril Ramaphosa selling South Africa out to the Russians then tripping over his own feet when he couldn’t let Putin meet him because he’d have to arrest him? Or is it Brice Nguemo body-guarding Ali Bongo Ondimba by arresting him so Albert Ondo Ossa couldn’t come to power and installing himself, instead? Or… might it be Emmerson Mnangagwa’s continuing sapping of Zimbabwe? Or, hey, maybe you didn’t yet know that there were only 1280 of us left on earth 900,000 years ago and that our species hung by the thread for 117,000 years because there wasn’t a Trump to kill us off?

But I couldn’t write about anything of that. Because of my own tale of woe. Which I’m now going to relate to all the many of you who love to read tales of woe, because well, we’ve all just seen Oppenheimer and want to believe there’s something worse.

EWT has been on vacation for about a month, but it started last December. Well, actually no. It started 22 years ago.

That was when EWT needed a newer and bigger server. Back in those days, you know, it was all networking. So friends of friends of family knew a guy who knew all about computer chips. So seamlessly EWT was up and running.

It took me several years before I realized it was running outside Seattle but you know, for 22 years it worked like a charm. I was here in Galena. Tumaini was there in Arusha. Rick was in New York. You’d never know the soul of EWT was in Seattle.

Then the soul got Covid. And a hacker nearly stole $20,000 from our bank account. And bank and FBI investigators said I better do something quick, but Seattle was sick and dying. Evil bottom feeders including Sugar Daddies – sorry, I mean GoDaddy bought up the Seattle company with EWT’s servers and whamo, 22 years of not noticing how small computer chips were getting suddenly confronted me.

I’m not sure I knew what a server was.

So urgently I asked friends and family alike, “What is a server?”

And … I still don’t know. But I went on the internet and found “hosts” who assured me I didn’t have to know and a few of them had really great TripAdvisor reviews and chose one that I couldn’t forget, A2.

Only I didn’t know I was being sold the host by a broker, not a techie. But I gave them hundreds and they whisked what was left of EWT in Seattle to Ann Arbor in a special organ transport bag on very expensive charter aircraft and so before it stopped snowing we all sighed relief.

Until…

… funny things started to happen.

Emails went the wrong direction. Many came back. When clients like some of you clicked on our websites they got ads for lotteries in Munich and threatening dinosaurs roaring out of speakers they never knew they had.

And then, the ultimate disgrace, the bare bottom of homelessness in a wired world happened. EWT was banned by Google.

I was assured by something that resembled a human being it was all for the better good. The voice/chat occasional doppelganger who appeared on the navigation panel of my Subaru assured me that EWT was being protected in a cloud and all I had to do was convert; no baptism was not enough.

Convert we have. Apprehensions cast away like wanton electrons. Privacy, human rights, organic speech – I’ve sacrificed it all. I joined the billions of the rest of you above the stratosphere, the astronomical cloud. I no longer mind that when I turn on my phone I get an advertisement for a new mattress I was just thinking about.

EWT is back. Somewhere. Not Seattle, that’s all I know.