Despite there being no rule about posts being on any sort of schedule in the 100 Days to Offload manifesto, I had good intentions about establishing a Tuesday/Thursday cadence for these posts, just to provide a bit more structure for myself. But here it is, Wednesday nonetheless, as I write this.

As I mentioned in № 1, my children went back to school this week, to their likely relief. But with them going back comes a daily flurry of all the irritating text messages the school district sends out about transportation issues and reminders about assignments or tests. The ones about transportation—i.e., such-and-such a bus route is starting late, or will be driven by a substitute driver, or will be consolidated with an adjacent route, and so forth—are, individually, unworryingly practical. Their frequency does mildly concern me—but I suspect buses are like tanks in their need for maintenance, and so it shouldn’t be surprising that some one (or more) of them needs work on any given day.

I am more irritated by the ones which say “Don’t forget such-and-such assignment!” or “Testing coming up!” These schoolkids already have district-issued iPads and Macbooks bombarding them with notifications and reminders; enlisting their parents seems a little unfair—or at least liable to encourage helicopter parenting and a default of making the adults responsible rather than the kids. As Proverbs 23:6 says:

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

And frankly that’s for good or for ill. So mostly I try to ignore these reminders unless it’s particularly egregious or impactful, and I feel like I need to bring it up. (The way to teach children responsibility is to give them responsibility and, therefore, consequences; but that doesn’t mean we can’t remember that they are still kids and cut them some slack sometimes.)

Incidentally, I learnt today that Proverbs 23:6 is one of the differences between the Septuagint and the Masoretic Text. It simply isn’t in the LXX. I don’t have a point here, I just thought it was odd.

I signed up for HEY email today for one of my domains. After going through some of their website and videos, I realized that they’re doing out of the box some of the things I have been trying to make happen manually with email rules—do this if the email is from this sender, or that if it has a this subject, and so forth. I don’t care for the fact that it’s a proprietary system, but I see why it is: obviously (as I have found) the kind of things they’re doing aren’t well-supported with existing protocols and applications.