text: Besides death and taxes, here's what you can count on - The Martha's Vineyard Times
  Home At Large Besides death and taxes, here's what you can count on
  "Announcements come daily of companies cutting back on spending and payrolls, from struggling start-ups to industry stalwarts like Intel and I.B.M. By some measures, the slide in technology stocks since their peak in March 2000 now approaches the magnitude, in percentage terms, of the market collapse in the worst years of the Depression. Clearly, a lot of the money, glamour, and people have left the technology business. And yet, the technology itself continues to spread, in every way."
  That was Steve Lohr, writing in The New York Times in August 2002, under a headline that reads "Technology Climate Is Gloomy, but Its Future Still Seems Bright."
  It's a mystery that we never see the edge of the cliff ahead, and a mystery that we climb out of the gulch time and time again.
  Soon, a powerful voice of accustomed authority bellowed, "Joe, what is wrong with the phone?"
  "Oh," Joe said, some internal alarms going off, "this fellow's using the line."
  "Well," the voice said, "he's got to stop. That's the credit card line."
  Joe's generosity had nearly put him out of business and certainly in Dutch with his wife.
  "Sorry," he said, "but I gotta have that line. I thought it would only be a minute or two."
  From the front porch of the tiny store, across a field where a steel band (for some unfathomable reason) would set up for a weekly dance party later in the day, I spied Condon's Garage, an auto and boat repair place.
  Condon's does brake jobs and ring jobs, valve jobs, head gasket jobs, and muffler jobs. The folks at Condon's could keep your old Ford pickup on the road by welding a bit of steel to the frame to span the rusted hole in the beam. The parts department, some of it anyway, lay beside the building in the form of old vehicles that hadn't escaped in running order but still had contributions to make.
  Condon's was not technologically advanced, but I guessed it had a phone. It did, and Mr. Condon, a bearish man with a closely cropped head, a sideways Downeast sense of humor, and a bemused look on his face, said, "Sure, go ahead and use the phone line. Take all the time you want, I don't want no phone calls anyway."