--- Triumph And Disaster and So On ---

Quickly, I realized that the District would use a tried and true expedient method of dealing with the issue it had created. They would arrange to transfer me to another school. This would allow malicious rumour to precede me. I was to be back in the nether world I had inhabited when I first came to Marigold. There is no way to justify such behaviour within an organization. Still, It pointed out to me just how much value the district placed on the work I had accomplished at Marigold. It had no value. Shades of James Bay, I was, once again expendable.

For eighteen months I fought back while my malicious teacher nemesis used a parent she had poisoned to threaten the District in order to destroy me. She threatened the Chairman of the Board and the Superintendent. Then, I was called into a meeting with nearly all the Central Office staff. The purpose of the meeting was ostensively to find way to defend me. But quickly it degenerated into how the District would cover its ass if the proverbial shit hit the fan in the local media. What shit? I had done nothing wrong and there was no evidence of any wrongdoing. I blew my top, told the assembled group what I truly thought of them and indicated that I would look after myself from that point forward and left the room. Although, I remained at Marigold until I retired, that meeting terminated any further commitment I might have had to organizational life.

"In the high and far times off times O best beloved... The wildest of all wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him"

Apple was no better than the District with foresight, the vision wasn't there under the leadership of John Scully and Amelio. In Canada The Apple Canada Education Foundation was shut down and Milt Petruk was terminated. As a parting gesture, the following year the District hired me to do a thorough review of technology in the District. My report, which cost them a pretty penny, never saw the light of day. I still have a snotty letter penned by the District's Technology guru, where he told me not to go on about the Internet as it would never be significant.

I've never really retired. First, as the Apple Global Education Fellow, I was made a Director of The Apple Global Education Network as it migrated onto Apple's new proprietary network "eWorld" This "product" never went global and died under the onslaught of the Internet taking AGE with it. For several years, I operated, in partnership,an early childhood care centre known as TechTots where computers were put into the hands of very young children. I have had my company, Davjd Allan Phoenix Associates since my retirement. My most significant client has been UK based Intuitive Media owned by Bob Hart and Carole Fletcher who I met at Cambridge. Sadly, that enterprise has gone the way of the dodo. My own company was never designed to make money. Instead, it has been a locus for my work, thoughts, and ideas. Throughout my latter years, I have confirmed to myself, that the individual is inevitably forced to compromise by the group and in so doing lessens the self to gain acceptance. Jonathon Livingston Seagull had no choice but to transcend and in Heller's "Catch 22" Yossarian rowed to Sweden.

"...A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go"

E. E. Cummings

---In the high and far off times, Oh, Best beloved an old man seeks to find a way and like the cat walks by himself---

"Maybe its too late, for now, in every walk of life, we are captured and comfortably enslaved by the almighty algorithm"