Without Warning

My Inner Retard

2012-01-31T21:33:00.002-05:00

We all use our brains in different ways, but I’ve noticed that almost everyone has what I call an “inner retard.” For higher cognitive functions, we use the part of our brain that is the most highly developed. But lots of things don’t require high-level analytical thinking, so there’s a part of your brain you use for such things. It can’t read or write, doesn’t appreciate art, can’t tell the difference between a filet mignon and a Big Mac. If you are scratching your ass, you delegate that task to your inner retard while the rest of your brain does something hard, like writing a blog. Which is very hard to do while scratching my ass.

We flew to Boston last week and met up with some old friends. One of them, who I will call Prudence, drove my wife and I to Maine, where we would be staying with other friends in their converted barn. The drive normally takes about 3 and a half hours, but we made it in about 7 hours, partially because we stopped at L.L. Bean. This is just a small part of the snowshoe department. I had no idea snowshoes were such a big business.

The other reason it took so long is because my wife sat next to Prudence in the front seat. When two women sit next to each other in the front seat, they talk. Constantly. This requires the higher brain functions, so Prudence’s inner retard was driving.

Conditions began to deteriorate almost immediately, and soon we were driving through sleety snow and slushy, icy roads.

The windshield was frequently fouled with dirty spray thrown up by other cars, so Prudence fiddled with the wipers, which were way overdue for replacement. They streaked and chattered, smearing the gunk around until visibility was near zero. Worse, the washer fluid ran out within minutes. I interrupted a conversation concerning dresses or shoes to beg Prudence to pull off the highway.

We bought a gallon of windshield washer fluid, and I refilled the reservoir, which to my dismay was about the size of a teacup. We didn’t get far before it ran out again. And again. Eventually, it ran out of fluid and when I refilled it, the lines had frozen. We drove the rest of the way with only small clear spots on the windshield, while I clenched my teeth in terror at every turn, and the women chatted about children or cooking with fresh spices.

Once in Maine, my friend (who I will call David), took me out snowmobiling. This is me, ready to ride a snowmobile or hold up a convenience store.

Snowmobiles are very fast. This one has a speedometer calibrated up to 160 m.p.h.

Conditions were very cold and sleety, and my goggles kept icing up, impairing my vision. At one point, I looked down and noticed that I was going 60 m.p.h., and it occurred to me that my inner retard was driving. I don’t know what my primary brain was doing, but it quickly calculated that if something unfortunate were to happen at that speed, there was an excellent chance that my head would strike a tree or a rock. I putted home at a much slower speed and made the acquaintance of Mr. Johnny Walker. This delicious and short-lived bottle of Scotch Whiskey costs $22 but when you return the empty bottle, they give you a 15-cent deposit refund.

Interestingly enough, drinking is one activity that everyone trusts their inner retard to do. The next morning, my primary brain calculated that there was a very good chance that my head must have struck a tree or a rock.

Happy Family

2012-01-15T14:08:00.002-05:00

I haven’t posted recently because we’ve been engaged in some home renovations that were very disruptive to our normal routine. OK that’s bullshit. The real reason I haven’t posted lately is because there have been some family issues. Back in the day, we used to call it “dirty laundry.”

An old comedian once said, “The definition of family is that when they knock on your door, you have to let them in.” It’s true, you have to take the good with the bad. Sometimes there’s a lot of bad to spread around.

I have one brother who is experiencing some health problems, another brother who is experiencing some financial problems, and yet another brother who is experiencing some legal problems. Yeah, I have to let them in, but do they all have to knock at once?

As if that’s not enough, my 19-year old daughter has been feeling her hormones over the past year or so, and my wife is dealing with similar issues associated with menopause. They are like oil and water. On fire. During a hurricane.

So things have been unpleasant to say the least. Lots of incidents where one or the other would storm out of the house, leaving me with the tattered remnants of the unfinished argument and the thankless role of peacemaker. When I was invited to visit with another family on Christmas Day, I jumped at the chance.

The family is all ethnic Chinese, although they come from South Africa and have that peculiar accent that sounds like Steve Irwin with a sinus infection. It was a typical chaotic family Christmas. The men played poker all day and the kids flew their new remote-controlled helicopters around the room, slicing the blossoms off the potted orchids that had been given to the women.

During dinner, someone brought out an iPad and Skype-called other family members in Canada. It was surreal, as everyone passed the tablet with a smiling Chinese face on it around the tablet, chatting with someone a thousand miles away. Thirty years ago it would have seemed like magic. I imagine that engineers are working on a system right now that will enable the tablet to float around the room, eliminating all that manual labor of passing it around.

After dinner, the women took over the poker table for a serious game of mah-johng against the men.

Mah-johng isn’t my game, and judging from my empty wallet, neither is poker. I said goodnight and returned home.

The next day, my wife wanted to order Chinese food from a local restaurant. Along with the usual dishes on the menu there was a section called “Chef’s Special,” with familiar dishes such as “General Tso’s Chicken.” One dish caught my wife’s eye. “I’d like to try this ‘Happy Family’,” she said.

“No, don’t bother,” I replied. “It’s a Chinese restaurant. In half an hour you’ll be unhappy again.”

The Radiant Glow of the Redneck Subculture

2011-11-27T17:49:00.002-05:00

Subcultures arise from their primary host cultures either by forced marginalization or by shared interests that deviate from the cultural mainstream. When I was growing up in the 50’s and early 60’s, the only obvious American subcultures were defined by ethnicity, religion or economic status. However, when I entered college in the late 60’s, the vibrant hippie subculture emerged.

Defined by music, art, fashion, drug experimentation and a philosophy of peace, it came to be identified as a “counterculture,” because it was in direct opposition to the mainstream of the time. This opposition let to a politicizing of the movement, which fractured it, and the pieces scattered to the winds like dandelion seeds. Who would guess that those seeds would germinate decades later?

Today there is a drug subculture, a wide variety of art, fashion and music subcultures, and philosophies are a dime a dozen. The vast, impartial presence of the Internet has enabled subcultures to flourish like never before. I’m constantly amazed by the odd groups people form that seem to have little appeal.

This week we visited my brother-in-law for Thanksgiving. He’s a classic redneck, with two RVs parked in his full-acre back yard. One runs, the other functions as a clubhouse for his sons, where they can play violent Xbox games and listen to loud, offensive music in air-conditioned comfort free from parental supervision. The boys also like to tear around on ATVs – yet another odd subculture. I understand dirt bikes, but 4-wheelers? I don’t get it at all.

My brother-in-law’s property is full of citrus trees, like this grapefruit tree groaning under the weight of ripe fruit.

Nobody in his house eats grapefruit, so we were encouraged to take all we could carry. My nephew helped with the harvest.

At the far end of the back yard there is a burn pit, and my brother-in-law throws every piece of wood and brush onto it until it gets too big.

Then, usually when there is company in the house, he waits until dark and burns it. The pile goes up in an intense, towering column of fire, and my brother-in-law runs around it with a hose, trying to keep it from spreading.

We stood around sipping cold drinks and looking at the stars, and then a totally new subculture was revealed to me.

It seems that my sister-in-law has discovered something called “glow parties,” where people get together to exercise in the dark, using various types of gear that are illuminated by LEDs. One type is something called Poi Balls, which are swung around in rhythmic patterns.

It’s hypnotic to watch, because the persistence of vision effect renders the balls as swooping, multicolored loops in the air.

Another example is the LED hula-hoop, which my sister-in-law demonstrated.

While people were playing with the hula-hoop and the Poi Balls, I found myself wishing that such technology had been available back in the late 60s. It would have been well-received, I think.

I Can't Talk About It

2011-11-01T19:13:00.001-05:00

You may have noticed a long period during which I haven’t blogged. In part, this was due to my recovery from Shingles, a process that is far from complete. I didn’t feel like writing.

But lots of things have happened that are worth writing about. The problem is, I can’t write about them.

This is because the events of the past month or so are related to experiences at work. Yes, I have a real job. And it’s a real job in an industry that takes itself very seriously. The kind of industry that fires people for writing about their job experiences.

Trust me, there have been events of high drama and outrageous humor. Events involving people who hold elevated corporate positions and would not like to read about themselves. It is killing me to not write about it.

Instead, I have to content myself with the comparatively mundane events that take place outside of work, and those events just don’t seem to measure up. It’s hard to feel inspired by my silly, predictable life when I go to work and it’s like watching Clash of the Titans.

So here are a couple of quotes from my lunkhead brother (I’ll call him Albert).

ALBERT: “Hey Tim. Do you ever go online and check the value of your house? My house is worth less than I paid for it! I’m getting screwed!”

Apparently, Albert has been living under a rock.

ALBERT: “Hey Tim. A message keeps appearing on my computer saying that there’s something wrong with Internet Explorer. What the hell is Internet Explorer?”

TIM: “It’s a program you use to go on the Internet.”

ALBERT: “No, I use AOL.”

Yep, under a rock.

Shingles

2011-10-09T14:10:00.004-05:00

I promised myself that I wasn’t going to write about this. Once I blogged about my knee replacement surgery and my Parkinson’s diagnosis, I decided that this wasn’t going to turn into a chronicle of my medical problems. Most illnesses just aren’t that interesting, and usually, they’re not very funny.

About a month ago, I developed an ugly, miserable disease with a silly, misleading name. When you’re a little kid, you get chicken pox. The virus stays in your body, and can return in later years (typically after the age of 50) in a different form, known as “Shingles.” Shingles is a disease of the nervous system, although it manifests itself in the form of a rash.

There’s a vaccine to prevent it, but it’s not commonly given because Shingles strikes less than 1% of the population. The medical community, in their wisdom, has decided not to publicize the availability of the vaccine to the 99% of the population who don’t need it. Instead, they’ll recommend it to those who have a known susceptibility to Shingles. The only way to demonstrate susceptibility is to develop a case of Shingles. Once the symptoms subside, your doctor will suggest the vaccine. You can ask for the vaccine, and your doctor will give it to you.

Ask for the vaccine. Trust me, you don’t want Shingles.

I’ve been suffering from it for a month now, and it shows very few signs of abating. I’ll describe it for you, even though I can’t imagine why anyone would be interested enough to read it, other than to convince themselves to demand the vaccine.

The whole thing started as a spider bite on my upper thigh. I have no idea if the spider bite triggered the Shingles, but the location of the bite and the timing just seem a bit too coincidental. The bite became inflamed and itchy, so I went to the doctor, who prescribed a course of antibiotics. At the same time, I started feeling a backache, as though I had pulled a muscle.

I followed my usual backache protocol, taking a muscle relaxer at bedtime. But by the morning, the backache hadn’t abated. Instead, it had intensified into a rolling series of intense, extremely painful spasms. I couldn’t sleep for more than 20 minutes an hour. The back spasms kept me out of work for a week. The spasms struck 3-4 times an hour, and each one felt like I was being stabbed by a red-hot stiletto.

Because the muscle relaxers hadn’t solved the problem, it seemed reasonable to conclude that the problem wasn’t muscular. So I let my wife talk me into visiting her chiropractor. I’m not a fan of chiropractors, but when you’re suffering, you’ll grasp at straws.

By this time, I was aching from head to toe, and had developed a rash in my crotch. When I say “rash,” I want you to think of old Biblical movies depicting lepers. The rash was blackish-purple, blistery and hot to the touch. It extended from the crease of my right leg up to my right hip, and around to my lower back. At times it felt as though biting bugs were crawling all over me.

The chiropractor attempted to “adjust” my back, but failed. The conclusion was that my problem wasn’t skeletal. I showed him the rash, and he rushed to the sink to wash his hands and insist that I see a “real” doctor.

The “real” doctor diagnosed the problem as Shingles, and prescribed an anti-viral medication designed to shorten the lifespan of the symptoms. By the end of the second week, the back spasms had diminished significantly, but the rash had grown and expanded. As it crusted over and gradually diminished, it left behind another problem, from which I am currently suffering.

The legacy of Shingles is something called “postherpetic neuralgia.” In simple terms, Shingles damaged my nerves, and the symptoms of the damaged nerves may persist for weeks, months, years, or even for the rest of my life. Everybody’s different, so I have no idea what to expect.

An area of my skin the size of two textbooks extending across my hip to my lower back has become hyper-sensitive to touch. A housefly landing on it feels like the talons of a hawk. A fold of silk brushing against it feels like a cheese grater. A cool breeze from a ceiling fan feels as though I’m being pelted with thumbtacks. Wearing clothes is agony. The spray of the shower is the seventh circle of hell. The back pain I initially experienced was the virus attacking my sciatic nerve. This nerve still occasionally provides me with sharp, painful reminders of the battle waged there.

I’m currently taking Vicodin and Lyrica to manage the symptoms, and they barely touch the problem. During the work day, I wear adhesive pads infused with Lidocaine to keep my clothing from grating against the most sensitive areas of my skin.

Lots of diseases have forbidding names: Gonorrhea, Eczema, Schizophrenia, Hemorrhoids, etc. Shingles sounds like the name of a children's party clown. If it was up to me, I’d change the name of Shingles to something more indicative of the pain and misery it causes, like “Roofing Nails.”

The Downside

2011-09-01T10:37:00.002-05:00

One of the things I’ve been telling myself about Parkinson’s disease is that at this point, it’s just cosmetic. My right hand performs the classic “pill-rolling” spasm when I walk, or sometimes wiggles uncontrollably when I’m relaxed, but otherwise, there’s no impact on my life. I’m not stupid – I know that eventually, simple tasks may become difficult, or I may be unable to work. But for now, there’s no reason to try and control the symptoms except for the sake of my own vanity.

Sure, I’ll have to stop certain activities as the symptoms worsen. For example, I’ve already stopped eating soup in restaurants, because by the time the spoon gets to my mouth, there’s often nothing in it. It’s a shame, because I love New England clam chowder. Maybe I can train myself to use cutlery with my left hand without appearing as though I was raised by wolves.

So until recently, I’ve been brushing it off, acting as though there’s no real problem; it’s no worse than a birthmark on my face. Until I got a haircut.

There was no way to see it coming. You walk in, sit down, and someone else does all the work. How could Parkinson’s disease possibly have a negative impact on this experience?

I drove to my local Great Clips, and was surprised when I was greeted by a young gay man who I’ll call Lyle. Usually, the staff at Great Clips are exclusively female. Lyle was friendly and professional, as he seated me in the chair and covered me with the smock. He made pleasant conversation as he moved around me, snipping and combing.

Suddenly, I realized that my right hand, which was sitting in my lap, had begun its uncontrollable wiggle. The smock covered my lap, but it was painfully obvious that something was going on there. I tried grasping my right hand with my left, but that only seemed to stimulate the shaking, which becomes worse when I’m nervous or agitated.

Lyle must have noticed. Perhaps he was flattered, although if I was in his position, I’d be pretty horrified.

Three and Out

2011-08-25T20:48:00.003-05:00

Our team assembled for our first round matches that started at 11 pm on Monday night. The league had set up two gigantic rooms full of pool tables – one for the tournament, and one for the pay-to-play mini-tournaments.

In the mini-tournament room, a dozen or so vendors had set up booths selling cues, t-shirts, accessories, instructional systems, etc. One guy had set up a table with a radar system, inviting players to try their luck at beating the fastest break speed of the day. Three shots for $5.

The main tournament hall was packed with throngs of players from the US, Canada and Japan. The elegant trophies were on display – very tempting prizes indeed.

In each round of play, the first team to win 3 matches wins the round. We would have to win four rounds to get into the money, eight rounds to get into the sweet sixteen, and four additional rounds to win it all - twelve grueling rounds total.

Our first set of matches was with a team called Eagles from Lansdale, PA. We were assigned to table number 13. I’m not superstitious, but we lost. I didn’t play. The tournament is a double-elimination format, so the loss pushed us into the loser’s bracket. We didn’t play badly, just not well enough.

We trudged back to the hotel, dejected. By then it was 4 am. Our next match was scheduled for 11 pm on Tuesday night, so everybody slept late and didn’t get too crazy during the day, trying to conserve energy and stay focused. One more loss, and we would be out of the tournament.

At 11 pm, we faced a team from Abilene, TX called Crazy 8’s. Their team captain was a tiny, skinny woman who had an incredibly smooth, powerful stroke. But she played one of our aces, and he beat her. Then, our team captain put me up against one of their low-skill players. I have to say, in all fairness and honesty, that I sucked. I’m a naturally high-strung guy normally, but that night I was shaking from head to toe. The combination of first-match nerves and Parkinson’s disease was causing me to suffer from uncontrollable spasmodic twitching. About two-thirds of my brain shut down. It looked like there were 100 balls on the table, and I was unable to calculate a shooting pattern. She beat me in two games, but our team went on to win that round anyway.

Once again, we went back to the hotel at 4 am. However, this time it was with a combination of elation and dread, because our next match was at 9 am, only 5 hours away. A couple of guys didn’t even bother going to sleep – they just walked the length of the Strip all night.

At 9 am, we played a team from Richmond, VA called 6-Pack. My team captain put me up against a player of equal strength. But this time, the first-match nerves were gone. I played extremely well, moving the cue ball around the table confidently, and beat him easily. Our team captain is a smoker, and the tournament is a non-smoking event. When our team captain played, he was desperately craving a cigarette, and it was obvious that it affected his game. He made one stupid error that cost him his match, infuriating one of our other players. We eventually beat them around 1 pm, and moved on to our third round, which was at 2 pm - only one hour later.

At 2 pm, we played a team from Crescent, PA who call themselves Fuego Pelota (flaming ball). If we won, we would move into the money and win $1,000 for the team. Fuego Pelota won the first two matches, so our backs were against the wall. Worse, our earlier victories had come with a price. The league monitors the matches carefully, reviewing the skill rankings of every player. If it appears that a player is winning too easily against an equally skilled (or higher skilled) opponent, that player will be raised in rank. The league chose to raise two of our players. One of our aces was raised to the point where we would be unable to play him, because there’s a limit to how many skill points we can play.

We put up a player who won, and then our team captain played. He had to win four games to beat his opponent, and he won the first three handily. In the fourth game, he had a simple, short cut shot on the 8-ball to win the match, but his nicotine craving had reached crisis proportions, and he missed the shot. His opponent came back strong and won four games straight to eliminate us from the tournament. It was a shame, because I was scheduled to play the final match of the round, against an equally skilled opponent. Unlike my first match, I was actually looking forward to it.

It's a Dry Heat

2011-08-25T11:26:00.003-05:00

Because of the time zone difference between Las Vegas and my home in Florida, our entire pool team went to bed by 10:30 on Saturday night. All except for the one I’ll call Gordon, who stayed up until 4:15 am playing Texas Hold ‘Em.

The pool tournament takes place in the Riviera hotel, across the street from where we’re staying. The opening round was scheduled for 9:30 pm on Sunday, so we had all day to goof around.

I woke up at 5 am on Sunday, and I just hung out in the casino playing Blackjack until my team members started to wake up. Some of us went to one of the famous “all you can eat” buffets, and I ate so much, I didn’t feel hungry for the rest of the day. Say what you will about the quality, it’s a great deal.

Later that morning, we found out that our team would not compete until 11 pm on Monday, which meant we had all day Sunday and most of the day on Monday to goof around as well.

On Sunday, my good friend (who I’ll call Wilbur) arrived to lend moral support. He’s the guy who taught me the game of pool. He’s an expert, and was looking forward to playing in some of the mini-tournaments run by the league, that pay cash prizes. Unfortunately, he was shut out because the league only admits league members into the mini-tournaments, and Wilbur no longer plays in the league. Nonetheless, we shot a lot of pool in a practice room set up for that purpose with large windows overlooking the Riviera swimming pool.

At one point, we ventured out to see the sights. But in August, the most noticeable characteristic of Las Vegas is the unrelenting, blistering, furnace-like heat. People say it’s a dry heat, but I wasn’t dry. Every crevice of my body was dribbling sweat. Wilbur and I were appalled by the way it sucked the life out of us. One of my teammates took a scooter tour of Red Rock Canyon, and he described the experience with the words, “like a blow dryer in your face.”

I’m convinced that Las Vegas is owned by cab drivers. They have a cheesy monorail system, but it’s expensive, and it only runs to a few destinations on the Strip. It doesn’t go to the airport. There are buses running up and down the Strip, but they’re expensive, crowded, and infrequent. They don’t go to the airport either. Taxis charge you 13 times a mile.

At one point, we went up to the top of the Stratosphere tower, a Las Vegas landmark, and according to a cab driver, the tallest structure west of the Mississippi river – although I don’t believe it. The view is a massive testament to urban sprawl.

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I realize that vacation pictures can be boring. It’s even worse when someone shows you pictures that they took of famous sights you’ve already seen. So I was trying to think of a simple way to bring some new life to familiar images. I brought a rubber glove with me, and had Wilbur take a few shots with me putting on the rubber glove in incongruous circumstances. Instead of “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas,” perhaps the motto of this town should be, “It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time.”

Off to a Flying Stop

2011-08-20T22:52:00.003-05:00

It’s time for the National Championship 8-ball tournament in Las Vegas. I’ve been anticipating this day with nervous excitement all week long. Unfortunately, that same excitement causes my Parkinson’s symptoms to act up, so my hand has been fluttering like a butterfly for days.

Halfway to the airport this morning, I realized that I had forgotten to pack my migraine medication. If I develop a migraine during the tournament, I’ll be unable to play, so I’m facing a hassle getting the prescription transferred from my pharmacy in Florida.

We took off on a clear, bright morning, weaving through puffy cumulus clouds.

Over Texas, I noticed these odd “crop circles,” created by circular irrigation systems.

Soon they were everywhere, stretching to the horizon.

Eventually, the land became more arid and mountainous.

After landing at the Las Vegas airport, we collected our bags and our pool cues from baggage claim. Pool cues have to be checked as baggage, because they’re classified as potential weapons. We then split a couple of cabs to our hotel. The league is putting us up at one of the worst hotels in Las Vegas – Circus Circus.

It was built in 1968, and by Las Vegas standards, it’s pretty lame. For example, the swimming pool is tiny and adjacent to a parking lot full of RVs. Worse, it’s packed with little kids. By comparison, the pool at the Riviera across the street is huge, and packed with nubile women in bikinis. Sorry, no pictures.

We were met at the hotel by our league operator, who delivered some aggravating news. It was 10:30 am Las Vegas time, but we wouldn’t be able to check in to the hotel until 3 pm. We would have to find some way to occupy ourselves for four and a half hours. Our team captain and I wandered around in the furnace-like heat, ducking into the noisy casinos when it got too oppressive.

Finally, weary and drained, we got our room keys. I’m rooming with another player from our team, who I’ll call George. George isn’t exactly a Rhodes scholar. We opened our luggage, and George said, “I don’t own a pair of flip-flops. This isn’t my suitcase.”

George had picked up the wrong bag at the airport. He quickly panicked, realizing that he faced a week without clean clothing. I found a name tag on the bag with a phone number, and we called it. Luckily, the guy who owned the bag (also named George) was staying at Circus Circus as well. He gratefully came to our room and picked up his bag.

Next we called the airline baggage office. George spoke to a stern woman who threatened to keep his bag unless he brought back the bag he had picked up by mistake. We had to call the other George and ask him to call the baggage office and straighten everything out. Later, another member of our team drove George to the airport so that he could pick up his bag.

The whole day has been exhausting, and I think I’m getting a migraine.

Side Effects

2011-08-06T06:06:00.005-05:00

In my last post, I talked about the potential side effects of a drug my neurologist prescribed to control my Parkinson’s symptoms. I didn’t list them all.

My doctor had prescribed a drug called Ropinirol, which is available in two forms: high-dosage timed-release tablets, and low dosage regular tablets. The advantage of the timed-release version is that you only need to take one a day. The regular tablets must be taken three times a day. Naturally, I chose the timed-release tablets.

I've been building my tolerance to the drug by cutting the timed-release tablets in half for a week, and then taking them full strength for a week. But I’ve been dissatisfied with the effectiveness of these timed-release tablets, so I spoke to the neurologist, and he changed the prescription to the 3-a-day regular tablets. The theory is that the drug will enter my system quicker, and enable me to take a fourth tablet per day if needed.

Yesterday morning I took the first one.

I got into my car and started the drive to work. My wife and I had stayed up late watching a bad sci-fi movie called “I Am Number Four,” so I felt like I needed a cup of coffee to start the day. I pulled into 7-Eleven, poured a cup, and got into the line of other caffeine-dependent wage slaves.

Within a few moments, I started to feel queasy, so I glanced at the display of greasy breakfast taquitos spinning on the heated rollers, wondering if some food might settle my stomach. I felt a brief head-rush sensation, as though I had gotten out of bed too fast. And then I opened my eyes and discovered that I was lying on my back looking at the ceiling, with a half a dozen 7-Eleven customers clustered around, eyeballing me curiously. I was drenched in sweat, and I had wet my pants.

A concerned Hispanic man had placed some towels under my head, which apparently had smacked pretty hard on the tile floor. He was urging me to lie still, telling me that someone had called 911. Against his wishes, I sat up and instantly felt nauseous. Someone brought me a bucket, but I had no desire to puke in front of a crowd of onlookers. I stood up, the Hispanic man clutched my arm, and I staggered to the rest room where I dry-retched horribly until the ambulance arrived.

The EMTs strapped me onto a gurney, attached electrodes to my chest, placed an oxygen tube in my nostrils, inserted an IV, and took my vitals while we sped to the hospital, lights and siren blaring.

In the emergency room, their primary concern was to determine if I had experienced a heart attack or stroke. They took an EKG, a chest x-ray, and an MRI of my head (to make sure I hadn’t fractured my skull in the fall). This process took hours, and I was lying in bed in my wet pants the whole time.

The nurse was a soft-spoken older guy named Don. I asked if there was anything he could do about it, and he immediately brought me a hospital gown and then cleaned me up. He was very kind, going about his business with gentle efficiency. But at one point, I was lying on my side, and he was washing my ass. “So, do you have any hobbies?” he asked. It was clearly the funniest moment in an otherwise very unfunny day.

The general consensus was that Ropinirol was to blame. Two potential side effects of the drug are “Nausea” and “Fainting,” so as far as I’m concerned, the culprit has been identified. I’ve been forbidden to take any more of it until I meet with my neurologist on Monday (he’s out of town), and I’ve been forbidden to drive all weekend.

I want to express my gratitude to the unknown Hispanic man who looked after me in the 7-Eleven, the EMTs and Don who washed my ass. I’d also like to thank the producers of “I Am Number Four.” If I hadn’t watched that awful movie, I wouldn’t have stopped for coffee, and this episode might have played out on the Interstate with very different results.

Honey, I Lost the House

2011-07-29T20:50:00.002-05:00

When my neurologist settled on the diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, I had a mild, intermittent tremor in my right hand, and a bit of a hitch in my right leg that caused me to drag my heel. If I concentrated, I could stop the tremor and walk with a normal gait. But it took a bit of effort.

Over the past couple of months, the tremor has become more pronounced. When I’m sitting or standing and I’m relaxed, it ranges from barely perceptible to nonexistent. But when I walk, some connection in my brain is closed, and my hand does a jitterbug. I’ve learned to walk with my thumb tucked into a fist.

My doctor prescribed Azilect, which is a mild drug used to control Parkinson’s symptoms. Unfortunately, it’s also expensive. With my insurance, it costs me $75 a month. For that kind of money, I want a drug that not only controls my symptoms, but makes me smart and good-looking as well.

Before long, I noticed that the Azilect wasn’t really doing the job. My hand still fluttered when I walked, or when I got nervous or excited. And, it was getting much more difficult to will it to stop. So I returned to the neurologist.

The doctor informed me that the next level of medication for Parkinson’s symptoms is called “dopamine agonists.” Dopamine is a hormone produced in the brain, and people suffering from Parkinson’s don’t have enough of it. Dopamine agonist drugs function in much the same way as dopamine, alleviating the symptoms of the disease. There are quite a few variations of this drug, and it’s a guessing game which will work the best for any specific individual. My neurologist flipped a mental coin and prescribed Ropinirole. One excellent benefit I noticed immediately is that this drug is cheap compared to Azilect.

Because Ropinirole is more powerful than Azilect, my doctor has to prescribe it in staged dosages, working me up slowly over a period of weeks to full strength. I thought this was excellent, because of my upcoming trip to Las Vegas to play pool in the National Championship Tournament. By the time I have to leave, I should be at full strength.

And then, my doctor explained the potential side effects.

Some are unpleasant or downright scary, like “nausea,” “insomnia” or “hallucinations.”

Some actually sound kind of cool, like “weight loss” or “increased orgasmic intensity.”

But there was one potential side effect that is so cruel, I swear I can hear God laughing: “A reduction in impulse control, leading to pathological addictions, such as gambling.” Great. Just in time for Las Vegas.

Green Irony

2011-07-24T08:17:00.001-05:00

When we first moved to Florida, we lived in a community that did not offer curbside recycling. Three years later, when we moved into our current house, the former owners left us their old beat-up recycling bin. It was covered with dings and holes and cracks. Because I had no experience with community recycling, I just assumed that the guys on the recycling truck would replace it when it became too shabby. That was thirteen years ago.

It finally reached the point where it was so broken and brittle that I was afraid it would fall apart. So I called the recycling center to ask what I had to do to get a new one. The person on the phone took my name and address, and promised that someone would stop by during the week to drop off a new recycling bin.

“Do you want me to leave the old bin out by the street?” I asked.

“No,” she replied. “They won’t pick up the old one.”

“Why not?”

And then she said something I could scarcely believe: “Because it’s not recyclable.”

Staggering under this crushing irony, I asked, “How do I dispose of it?”

“Put it out by the curb on trash day. You have to put it into a trash bag, or the trash collectors won’t pick it up.”

So somewhere in our local landfill are thousands of old recycling bins, concealed in garbage bags like the bodies of Mafia snitches, unable to perform the one service they were designed to provide.

Five Rounds

2011-06-15T20:49:00.007-05:00

The unimaginable has occurred.

Readers of this blog are probably aware that I play pool in a league, and have been doing so for at least six years. We play about 210 matches a year, struggling to finish in the top 3 in our division. If we do, we go into the playoffs, playing two of the best teams in the division to determine the division champion.

If we finish first in our division, we are entered in the regional qualifier tournament, in which we play the best teams in other divisions around Central Florida. The regional qualifier is a 3-round single elimination tournament, which means you have to beat three other champion teams. Lose once, and you go home.

But if you win three times, your team goes on to play in the regional championship tournament. The regional championship tournament is a grueling race – a 5-round double elimination tournament. This means you have to beat five of the best teams in Central Florida. Because it’s a double elimination format, you can lose once, but not twice.

If this seems like a lot of effort, it is. But if by some miracle your team wins the regional championship tournament, the league pays to fly your entire team to Las Vegas for the national championship tournament. It’s a fantastic, seemingly unattainable prize, but every year, teams achieve it. This year is our year. Last weekend, in a 2-day, 26-hour marathon, we defeated five excellent teams to win the big prize:

Hundreds of players competed in four brackets at the local Moose Lodge. Here’s what we had to go through to win. In each round, the first team to win three matches is the victor.

Round 1 (9:00 am – 12:30 pm Saturday)

Round 2 (1:00 pm - 4:30 pm Saturday)

Our next opponent was a team called “Here’s Your Sign,” and they absolutely slaughtered us. They beat us 3 straight matches, to send us to the loser’s bracket.

Loser’s Bracket Round 1 (5:00 pm – 8:30 pm Saturday)

We had a bye in the first round of the loser’s bracket (which doesn’t count as a victory). We had 3 hours to kill, so we went to a local bar and practiced, because the tournament tables were all occupied.

Loser’s Bracket Round 2 (9:00 pm Saturday –12:30 am Sunday)

Winner’s Bracket Round 4 (10:00 am - 1:30 pm Sunday)

Winner’s Bracket Round 5 (3:00 pm - 6:30 pm Sunday)

Nobody could believe it. We’re going to Las Vegas in August to play in the National Championship tournament. It’s like an amazing dream.

Meanwhile, on the table next to us, Hoagie won his match decisively, and his team won the round, so they're going to Las Vegas as well. I suspect Hoagie's confidence is restored.

I remember one indelible image from the competition. Players are obligated to sit in isolation seats set up away from their team members, so they can’t be coached. One woman, having missed a shot, sat sobbing uncontrollably in the isolation seat, believing she had lost the deciding match on the error. Moments later, her opponent flubbed his shot, and she jumped up and won the game. Misery to joy in less than a minute.

Our team won a hideously ugly trophy, which we're obligated to give to the bar that hosts our team. It will be prominently displayed, with a plate engraved with all of our names. I asked the lovely barmaid to pose with it to soften the grotesque contours. The trophy guy came by and offered to sell us exact replicas for our homes at a cost of $45. We're all getting them, of course.

Incurable

2011-06-08T20:14:00.002-05:00

A very long time ago, I was working as a printing press operator. One of the tasks I had to perform was to watch for “hickies,” which are bits of lint or dust that get stuck to the inked areas on the printing plate and leave blotches on the printed piece. To remove a hickie, you can stop the press, but most printers save time by dabbing at the plate with a wet cotton ball while the press is running. It’s a dangerous practice, and one day I got the middle finger of my right hand caught between the rollers.

The press stopped, because the belts were old and loose. Had it been a newer press, I’d have 9 fingers today. The finger was squashed pretty flat and popped open like a bratwurst on the grill, but thankfully was not broken. I lost most sensation on one side, and couldn’t bend it very far. Once the stitches healed up, the doctor told me that I would probably never get a full range of motion or restore the damaged nerves. I resolved to prove them wrong.

I bought a book on card tricks, and spent hours every day learning manipulations. They are hard skills to master even with a full complement of working fingers, so they were agonizingly slow for me. In less than a year, I recovered my range of motion and all of the sensation in the finger. Here’s one of the tricks:

About a month ago, I was at work, typing. I’m an excellent typist - fast and accurate. But on this particular day, I typed the word “appear,” and it came out “appppppear.” I held my right hand up to my face and demanded to know what was going on, but got no answer. Later that same week, I woke up one morning to the insistent chime of my alarm clock. I reached over with my right hand to hit the button that turns it off, but my hand hit the button repeatedly, oscillating up and down. Eventually I rolled over and used my left hand to turn it off, but it was enough to send me to the doctor.

The doctor sent me to a neurologist, who conducted several tests, including a brain MRI. He concluded that I have the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. There are medications I can take to control the symptoms, up to a point. There’s no cure. The disease will progress at its own pace, different for everyone. The most I can hope for is that it progresses slowly, and that over the remainder of this decade, new medications or surgical procedures are developed to treat it.

However, the neurologist did tell me that I can take some steps to slow the progress of the disease. These include aerobic exercise and coordination exercises for my affected hand. So I’m working out on the exercise bike 4 – 5 days a week, and I’m back to card tricks and one of my favorite mindless activities, juggling:

When I first got the diagnosis, I was shocked and depressed. Now I have mixed feelings. Yes, it’s incurable, but it’s not going to kill me, so there’s hope. However, I’m angry about my game of pool. I’ve worked hard to develop my skill, and it’s already starting to deteriorate. I started playing the game because I felt that nothing could make me stop. There are elderly players, players with missing limbs, players in wheelchairs. But it looks like in a few years, I’ll be sitting on the sidelines, shaking and cheering them on.

Joint Chiefs Meeting

2011-05-02T16:56:00.001-05:00

President Obama: Gentlemen, it's confirmed. We've located the hideout of Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. I want a small team of tough, highly trained American soldiers to breach his compound and kill him. No collateral damage. A nighttime operation, in and out in under an hour. It will be dangerous, difficult and I will not tolerate failure. Admiral, are the Navy SEALS up to the challenge?

Admiral Roughead: Yes, sir, I'll get right on ...

General Dempsey: Sir, the Rangers are ready to undertake this mission.

President Obama: I'm thinking of using the SEALS here, Marty.

General Dempsey: But sir, with all due respect, this is a ground op. It's 600 miles from the nearest boat. Army is the way to go.

General Amos: If I may interject, the Marine Corps has a long, proud history of both land and sea ...

General Dempsey: Shut the hell up, Jimmy.

President Obama: We're gonna go with the SEALS, this time. Sorry Marty. Maybe the next international terrorist mastermind.

General Dempsey: The next one? The next one? What next one? You've been using robot aircraft to take them out!

General Schwartz: Very effectively, if I may say so. Cheap to operate, no risk to American soldiers, ....

General Dempsey: You sons of bitches sitting in La-Z-Boys playing video games while my boys are sweating and bleeding to earn a chance to be heroes! Please, sir, please. You gotta give this one to the Rangers. They work so hard. They've all got your picture on their lockers. I take back those things I said about you and the SEALS at the Foreign Press dinner after that Somali pirate thing. I was outta line.

President Obama: SEALS, Marty. Rangers next time, maybe. Meeting adjourned.

She Won't Go Down

2011-04-14T20:34:00.002-05:00

There’s a young woman in my office who has been clumping around in an orthopedic boot for weeks. It’s the kind of thing a doctor makes you wear when you break an ankle. I asked her about it in the elevator the other day, and she told me that it was “the result of spending too much time in uncomfortable shoes.” No broken bones, no plantar fascitis, no hammer toes or bunions. Just painful and lingering nerve damage.

I started doing an informal research project, paying close attention to women’s shoes. I work in a very large company, and there are probably 350 people in my office alone, at least half of them women. The office requires “business casual” attire, and 90% of the women wear heels. Of those wearing heels, at least 75% wear high heels, often so high that the movements of the women wearing them appear stiff and graceless. The small minority who wear flats appear relaxed and comfortable.

The other day, I was on the elevator by myself as I was leaving the building. It stopped on the second floor, and two women got on.

“I feel so guilty taking the elevator,” one of them said. “But I hate using the stairs.”

“Yes,” the other woman agreed, “I know what you mean. I’ll go up, but I won’t go down.”

I asked them what they were talking about, and one of them said, “It’s the high heels. When you go down a flight of stairs, it really hurts to put your weight on that heel.”

“Many women have told me that the reason they wear high heels is because it’s attractive to men,” I said in a mock-serious tone. “But as a man, I feel obligated to tell you that we genuinely don’t care what kind of shoes you wear.”

They chuckled, and one of them said, “Yes, but sometimes we like to look a little taller.”

The doors of the elevator opened, and we stepped into the lobby.

“But don’t women all claim that they want men who are taller than they are?” I asked. “Why make yourself taller and limit your options?”

They minced painfully towards one building exit, and I headed for another. But as they left, one of them said to the other, “He’s right. Why do we do this?”

In Praise of the Penny

2011-04-07T19:43:00.003-05:00

People who collect coins are called “numismatists.” I’m not one of them, because I realized early on that the coins we get in change aren’t very valuable, due to their condition. If you take collecting seriously, you have to pay big bucks for mint-quality coins and hold them for a very, very long time.

Nevertheless, I often examine my pocket change just out of casual curiosity. I check out any new designs and read the dates. Today, I was stunned by a penny.

I vividly remember, as a kid, finding the occasional Indian Head penny, which ceased production in 1909. I don’t ever recall finding one older than 1900, so most of the ones I found were around 40 – 50 years old.

The coin that replaced it is commonly known as the “wheat back” penny. In 1959, the back of the penny was changed to a depiction of the Lincoln Memorial. “Wheat back” pennies started to get scarce. Sometime in the mid-70’s, I started separating them from my change, tossing them into a drawer. 25 years later, they had doubled in value, so I sold them for a whopping 2 cents apiece.

Today I dumped a handful of change on a counter and spotted this “wheat back:”

When I turned it over, I was shocked to see that it was minted in 1930:

This coin, still in circulation, is 81 years old. And yet, it’s less worn than pennies half that age. It’s been around since Herbert Hoover was President. Assuming it hasn’t spent a major part of its life languishing under a sofa cushion or soaking in a wishing well, this penny has probably been handled by nearly 10,000 people.

It’s easily the oldest coin I’ve ever found. I only hope I look that good when I’m 81.

There is a movement (I prefer the term "conspiracy") dedicated to the elimination of the penny from U.S. coinage. The arguments are that it's costly and that pennies have almost no buying power. Personally, I feel that the elimination of the penny will cause an almost instantaneous form of inflation that would be tiny in scope, but make a few very wealthy people much wealthier without having to lift a finger.

I have faith that at some point, the dollar will rebound, becoming a strong currency once again. When that happens, pennies will regain value as currency. I say wait it out. I have a penny in my pocket that has been waiting for 81 years.

My Rational Fear of Zombies

2011-03-30T19:27:00.003-05:00

At some point in our lives (usually by the age of 6), we have to admit to ourselves that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy aren’t real. This revelation is both depressing and liberating, germinating the seeds of skepticism and logic that govern our lives as adults. Rational debate is one of the distinguishing hallmarks of adulthood.

For reasons I cannot understand, movies involving vampires, werewolves and zombies remain immensely popular, despite the simple logical arguments that render them into implausible childish myths. All of these creatures are proposed as physical beings, not supernatural or magical. And yet, all but one of them could exist without the aid of some unspecified force that is not part of the natural world.

Vampires, for example, must consume human blood to live. What is the component of human blood that enables them to survive that is not present in rabbit blood or cow blood? It’s never explained, because there is no such component. Animal blood would be much easier to obtain, and reduce vampires from a terrifying threat to ordinary neighbors who have an unusual diet and work the night shift.

And does anyone really believe that vampires can be repelled by crucifixes or garlic? Or that they can transform themselves into bats or other creatures? (See werewolves, below.)

The one thing I can believe about vampires is that they have a sensitivity to light. Not the blistering, screaming, bursting-into-flames sensitivity that we see in the movies, just the kind of thing that could be handled by 30 SPF sunblock, a floppy hat and a pair of Oakleys.

Werewolves are supposedly human beings who have contracted a disease from another infected human. Every 28 days, for no apparent reason, the human is forced to change into a wolf for one night, which makes no sense at all. Becoming a wolf does not serve any purpose. I like to imagine the werewolf virus mutating every year, like the flu. One year, you’re a panda. Next year, you’re an armadillo.

The thing I find laughable about werewolves is that nobody bothers to calculate the metabolic cost of transforming from a human form to that of a wolf (and back again) in the space of a few minutes. You couldn’t consume enough calories in a lunar month to accomplish it, and the stress of the transformation would undoubtedly kill you.

The problem with zombies is that there are two kinds (depending on your literary source) - a reanimated corpse or a living human infected with some germ or toxin. Regardless of the zombie definition, both of them want to kill non-zombie humans. They are universally depicted as profoundly retarded creatures, so how do they tell a zombie from a non-zombie? And why humans? What’s the appeal? Why not pigeons or cats?

The idea of a rotten corpse somehow developing the ability to move and produce enough energy to dig itself out of a grave and walk around is just absurd. The degraded tissues would be incapable of such actions, not to mention the indignities imposed on corpses by morticians. I suppose an argument could be made that fresh corpses are available everywhere, but I think the living would outnumber them by a large margin, so they wouldn’t pose very much of a threat.

That leaves the “infected living” zombie. It’s easy to imagine a human being turned into a psychopathic killer, because psychopaths already exist. Of the three, it’s the only one that has no logical barriers. So far, nobody has developed an infectious agent that will accomplish this goal. The only thing we know for sure is that somewhere, deep in an underground lab, somebody is working on it.

So I’m not sharpening stakes or making silver bullets, but maybe a shotgun wouldn’t be such a bad idea.

XD28NE

2011-03-05T14:29:00.003-05:00

The problem with mental illness is that typically you don’t know you have it until someone else tells you, or until you diagnose yourself. Most people are unwilling to diagnose themselves. However, recently I’ve begun to feel as though I might suffer from a form of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

I don’t wash my hands a dozen times a day or eat my food counter-clockwise or lock the door repeatedly. I read automobiles.

For example, I read vanity plates, often maneuvering in traffic to get a better look. Because of the character limit, some of them can be cryptic puzzles. “NGOTI8R,” for example, or “RCKTMN.” Others are simple, such as the two I saw in one day a few months ago: “HUGEEGO” and “FREUD.” How funny would it be if they were involved in a collision?

I know this doesn’t seem like much of an obsession, but if I can’t figure one out, it bothers me all day. But that’s just a small part of the problem. What really consumes me are bumper stickers and decals.

Most are textual, so they’re not especially hard to figure out. Others are in the form of symbols or images that don’t make immediate sense. I try to group them into categories. The top two categories are Decorative and Affiliations. The Decorative category holds those items that are displayed solely for their aesthetic value.

The Affiliations category holds those items that indicate the preferences or formal memberships held by the driver. They fall into sub-categories: Religious, Military, Professional, Sports, Ethnic, Political and Entertainment. Usually, I can pick the category from a distance, and identify the exact affiliation when I get a little closer. Entertainment is the hardest, because unknown bands often have unintelligible names or strange logos.

On my daily commute, I often see the same vehicles, which have become familiar to me. There’s the lady with the “Never, Never, NEVER Shake a Baby!” bumper sticker. And the guy with a dozen stickers: 11 espousing extremist political opinions and one that says “Coexist.”

But there’s one car I see all the time, that bears this indescribable image, along with the message, “XD28NE:”

The image resembles a scarab beetle, or perhaps a radiation warning sign. I thought it might be an image from a video game, or a band logo – but a Google search of “XD28NE” reveals nothing.

The unsolvable mystery of this image is driving me insane. Please, if you have any idea what this represents, let me know. I’ll be eternally grateful, and far less likely to run this person off the road to demand the answer.

The Mysterious Newport

2011-03-01T21:19:00.002-05:00

I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri and left immediately after completing college there. Back in those days (40 years ago), St. Louis was a classic example of urban blight. People fled to the suburbs, and the inner city deteriorated into a dangerous mixture of empty, decaying buildings, and poor, desperate people. I couldn’t wait to get out.

During the time I lived there, the Gateway Arch was constructed, Sportsmen’s Park was replaced by the “technologically advanced” Busch Stadium (which itself has been replaced recently), and the notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project was built, only to be demolished 16 years later after becoming a rat-infested slum.

All of these construction projects had one thing in common: Acres of shabby, condemned buildings were bulldozed to make room for them. But it wasn’t just urban renewal that scoured entire neighborhoods from the St. Louis landscape. Gaslight Square, the well-known nightclub district vanished during my college years, a victim of crime and neglect.

It’s hard for me to believe that anything remotely historic survives in St. Louis. On my visit there last week, my sister took me to the Crown Candy Kitchen. This place opened in 1913, but despite the fact that I grew up in St. Louis, I had never heard of it.

It’s a tiny remnant of a genteel time. Part restaurant, part soda fountain, part confectionary, you can easily imagine clean-cut teenagers hanging out and playing the jukebox during the 1950’s. Today it survives in a formerly-depressed neighborhood that desperately wants to gentrify, but can’t quite get over the hump. The Crown Candy Kitchen has become something of a hipster lunchtime destination. My sister took me there because she wanted me to try the Heart Stopping BLT.

This sandwich differs from a normal BLT in that proportionally, the lettuce and tomato contribute almost nothing to the taste. Nearly a pound of bacon is crammed between two slices of white bread.

My sister and I split one, but my 88-year old father never met a meal he couldn’t finish.

The Crown Candy Kitchen is a charming old building, with hand-made booths, a pressed-tin ceiling, and hand-lettered signs. The menu over the soda fountain listed prices for Sundes, Special Sundaes, Deluxe Sundaes, and something called “Newports.” A waitress explained to us that a Newport is a normal sundae, but it’s topped with whipped cream and crushed pecans.

I’m fascinated that I’ve never heard of a Newport before. If this is a regional delicacy, you’d think I would know about it, having grown up in the region. I know about frappes and jimmies in Massachusetts, scrapple in Pennsylvania, and prairie oysters in Nebraska. Maybe the Crown Candy Kitchen is like the last of a dying species, the only place left that retains once-common cultural knowledge.

Salesmen, Lawyers and Alcohol

2011-02-26T13:12:00.004-05:00

When it comes to alcohol consumption, I’m kind of a lightweight. Some men approach it as a competition, racing toward a finish line they can never reach. Others are like children with a big bag of candy on Halloween, greedily consuming too much of a good thing. I prefer to think of it as medication, taken in measured doses to relax the bonds of social convention.

Over my career I’ve met lots of salespeople, who I believe are a separate species. This is because the successful ones all share certain characteristics that are not shared by successful people in other professions. These include vanity, deceit, avarice, thoughtlessness, desperation and a monumental appetite for alcohol.

Occasionally, I’ve been invited to join members of this species for meals paid for by their company expense account. These are always ridiculously expensive events, almost as though the restaurant was specifically selected for the outrageous prices. I have no training as a psychologist, but I suspect that this is one mechanism that salespeople use to value themselves.

At one memorable event in Washington, DC, I was invited to dinner by two salesmen. Between the three of us, the meal cost over 500 dollars. And this was over 15 years ago. The men ordered five bottles of wine in the course of the evening, and sucked it down like lemonade. They often topped off my glass, urging me to drink more. I enjoyed the wine, but I cautiously drank just enough not to be ridiculed. When we stood up to leave, the salesmen wove their way unsteadily through the tables occupied by human diners. We got as far as the restaurant lobby when one of the salesmen suddenly covered his mouth and raced to the bathroom. After spending all that money on fine food and wine, he didn’t even get it out of the restaurant.

I sometimes wonder if other professions attract members of other species as well. For example, many people believe that lawyers are a species of blood-sucking parasite.

Last week I flew to St. Louis to visit my elderly father and other family members. One evening, my sister, my niece and her fiancée (who I will call Perry), went out to a local bar for Trivia Night. Perry is a law student in his last semester. Here is my niece and Perry:

Trivia Night is held once a week, and the bar quickly fills with eager patrons, who form teams. You can have as many people on your team as you wish, but the prize structure discourages teams larger than five people. A master of ceremonies asks general-knowledge trivia questions, and the teams write down their answers. There are five rounds, fifteen questions per round. If your team wins a round, you win a bucket of five beers. If your team records the highest score for all five rounds, you win $50. My niece and her fiancée do this all the time, and frequently win the grand prize.

Perry is a quiet, cerebral guy who takes Trivia Night very seriously. Our team tied for high score in the second round. When this happens, another competition is held to determine the winner. The tied teams each elect a single competitor. Each of them is handed a pint of beer, which they must chug. The first to finish wins. Perry took it upon himself to compete.

Unfortunately, Perry had just finished a large meal, and was competing against a guy twice his size. He got about half the beer down, gave up and raced for the bathroom. I predict a long and successful career for him as a sober blood-sucking parasite.

We tied again for the final round, and I offered to compete. This is very unlike me, but I was already one beer over my normal maximum. I met my opponent, who was a third my age. To everyone's amazement, I beat him.

Unfortunately, the reward for my success was more beer. We were only able to finish three of them, and gave the remaining two to the big guy who defeated Perry in the chugging contest.

We came in second in total points for the night, which gnawed at Perry. Instead of enjoying himself, he kept reviewing the missed questions in his head. I treated the whole evening as a raging success. A new personal best in per-hour beer consumption, a chugging victory, and I retained my dinner. Life is good if you avoid salesmen and lawyers.

My Life as a Woman

2011-02-10T19:29:00.002-05:00

Over 10 years ago I developed a thickened callous on the heel of my left foot, which then dried out and cracked open. It was ugly and painful to walk on. So I went to a podiatrist who sliced at it with a scalpel, explaining to me that this can happen at any time in a person’s life, for no known reason.

After he pared the callous down to normal thickness, he recommended that I treat it with a particular moisturizing cream made from pure lanolin. I went to the drugstore and was mortified to discover that the cream is only available in the section of the store reserved for infants and mothers. The cream is used primarily by women who breastfeed, when their nipples become sore. This fact is prominently declared all over the package: “Breast Feeding Cream,” it says, “For breastfeeding mothers.”

I had to limp to the front of the store and buy it from some teenage kid, who stared curiously at my nipples while he rung it up.

Not long ago, after my knee surgery, my doctor suggested that I take a daily multivitamin to restore my energy. “Get one with vitamin B-12 and iron,” he told me.

So I went to the drugstore and entered the unregulated war zone called the “Vitamin Supplement Aisle.” There are dozens and dozens of supplements available, and the multivitamins are subdivided into marketing segments: Children, Men, Women, Older Men, Older Women, Pregnant Women, Athletes, and probably Pregnant Athletes.

Naturally, I read the labels of every “Male” multivitamin package – a 30-minute task. Some contained vitamin B-12, some did not. However, not a single multivitamin supplement marketed to men contains Iron. Not one. But almost every “Female” multivitamin contains iron, because women lose blood during the menstruation cycle.

So every day, I have to take a vitamin prominently labeled “For Women.”

I hope I never develop varicose veins, because it's gong to be tough to find pantyhose in my size.

Don't Drink the Kool-Aid

2011-01-28T20:01:00.002-05:00

My 18 year old daughter wants to pursue a cosmetology license. I can’t really argue with her decision, because it’s something that interests her, and nobody is outsourcing those jobs.

There are several schools in our area that offer certification programs. Some are low-rent vocational schools, and some are snooty, fashionable and expensive. You can probably guess which one my daughter wants to attend.

The one she’s interested in is named for a well-known New York hairdresser, who has used his name recognition to franchise a branded curriculum all over the country. The school is known for its “method,” which is a rigid protocol for the practice of cutting and styling hair.

One of the primary requirements (in addition to the outrageous tuition) is that each student must purchase a “kit” of equipment and branded hair products for $2,000.

I recently attended an event with her, and we met a guy named Michael. He’s a trim, neatly-groomed man in his fifties who is a hairdresser with his own business. I peppered him with questions about the profession, while my daughter listened eagerly to his answers.

He asked which school she was planning to attend, and she told him. He grimaced and said, “Well that’s fine, but let me give you a bit of advice – ‘Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.’”

I glanced at my daughter and saw a facial expression that can best be described as “Huh?” I realized instantly that she had no idea who Jim Jones was. Fortunately, she’s a smart girl and kept her mouth shut.

We had a good laugh about it later in the car. It made me wonder what other expressions that make sense to me would be meaningless to people her age. So I tried out a few with a group of her friends.

“Sufferin’ succotash!” – They got this one immediately, because old cartoons are constantly recycled for new generations.

“I am not a crook!” – One kid got that quickly, because as he said, “They mentioned it on an episode of Family Guy.” So even new cartoons represent their primary source of information.

“We’re more popular than Jesus.” Finally, that one stumped them.

Can you think of any other good ones?

A Month Without Posting

2011-01-02T00:51:00.002-05:00

I didn’t write a single blog post during the entire month of December – an unusual and troubling lapse. It’s not that I didn’t have ideas, because I have those all the time. Usually, I ruminate on them for a day or two and then start writing when I have a spare hour or so. It’s the hours that have been lacking.

It all started when we rearranged the furniture in one room of our house. Let me rephrase that: It all started when I rearranged the furniture in one room of my house while my wife supervised. In the process, I had to empty a bookcase. Two shelves of the bookcase contained commercial VHS videotapes that my daughter had watched when she was little. Most were produced by a giant entertainment conglomerate associated with a cartoon mouse.

We deposited most of them in the Goodwill box, but about a half a dozen tapes were designated as my daughter’s favorites. My wife, realizing that VHS tapes were prone to disintegration over time, asked me if I could find those titles on DVD. I was surprised to discover that the giant entertainment conglomerate is hoarding their back catalog, releasing titles on DVD only when it suits them. This probably has something to do with annual earnings, but I suspect that the creative well has run very dry and it’s the only way they have left to make real money.

So my wife asked if there was any way to copy them onto DVD, which would enable my daughter to watch them with her own children someday without fear of destroying the tapes. I did a little research and discovered an inexpensive device that converts analog VHS signals to digital files that can then be burned onto DVD fairly easily.

We were down to one VCR in the house, which I moved to my computer room and hooked everything up. I was unprepared for what happened next. My wife walked in with a gigantic armload of the videotapes we had taken of my daughter during the first 10 years of her life. She dumped them on the desk and said, “Copy these, too.”

For those of you unfamiliar with this process, there are several steps. The first step is to digitize the videotape, which is a real-time process. In other words, ten 6-hour videotapes will take 60 hours to digitize. Each file is hundreds of megabytes in size. You have to take each file, cut it up into DVD-size chunks, add a DVD menu with chapter divisions, and burn the DVD. I’ve done over 40 of them in the past month.

They include videos of the pregnancy, the birth, first steps, first birthday, first pony ride, first roller skates – you get the idea. She’s an only child and we had a video camera and lots of time. Mixed in with all of the usual nonsense are some genuinely adorable moments. I’m sure every parent probably feels the same way about their kid, and has hours and hours of shaky, blurry videos, so I’m not going to post any clips here, even though I’ve invested a month of my life making them.

If you have any videotapes you want to digitize, drop me a line and I’ll tell you what to buy. But don’t ask me to do it for you, because once this project is finished, I’m going to smash this little box with a sledgehammer.

Fear of Cool

2010-11-21T22:07:00.002-05:00

Back in the early 70’s, I worked for an electronics company that employed some genuine eggheads. This is a class of people I respect, and whose company I enjoy, but I have never been a qualified member. In the R&D lab of this company, the engineers were working with a new tool – it was a box about the size of two shoeboxes, with a series of lights and toggle switches on the front panel. It was an Altair 8080, the first true minicomputer. There was no monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. It had to be programmed manually, by flipping the toggle switches to define the instructions, one tedious byte at a time.

For reasons I cannot explain, I thought it was cool. I didn’t have a science background, I wasn’t an engineer, and I have always hated math. A few years later, the company wanted to sell the Altair, and I almost bought it. But in 1980, I bought this thing instead – a Sinclair ZX80:

It had one kilobyte of RAM, an awkwardly tiny membrane keypad (I’ve placed a quarter on the case as an indicator of size), and you had to hook it up to a black-and-white TV set which functioned as the monitor. If you wrote a program, you had to store it on a cassette tape player. It wasn’t properly grounded, so every time I touched it after walking across the carpet, it would get zapped by the static discharge and reset. I loved it.

A few years ago, BMW bought the British company that made the Mini Cooper and introduced it to the American market. It was a squat, boxy little car that had about as much curb appeal as a motor scooter. A guy I know who has a normal supply of testosterone confused me when he told me that he thought they were cool.

I now realize that the concept of coolness is irrational and totally subjective. Throughout my life, I’ve met numerous people with irrational fears. One woman I know used to be an Israeli tank commander, but she will run screaming if she sees a snake. It seems that desire and fear are somehow related, and dwell comfortably in the irrational zone of our limbic system.

This would explain a lot of things, actually. For example, it would help to explain why some women date abusive men. Or why some men engage in risky, thrill-seeking activities.

But now that I understand this strange relationship, I’ve developed a new fear: The fear of the next thing that I think is cool.

Stealing Coffee

2010-11-07T13:43:00.002-05:00

Before we start, I want to make it perfectly clear that I did not steal anything, nor do I condone stealing anything. I carry too much Catholic guilt to feel comfortable with stolen goods, even cheap office supplies. If I drive home from work with a ballpoint pen in my pocket, I leave it next to my keys to be certain I remember to return it the next morning.

But my brain is always devising little scams, things I would never do in real life. It’s kind of a pointless hobby, like the guy who sits in his basement tying fishing flies during the winter, but never goes fishing in the summer.

Yesterday, my wife and I went to Costco, where she bought a 2-pound bag of coffee beans, despite the fact that we don’t own a coffee grinder.

“Just take it to the supermarket,” she told me. “Use their coffee grinder.”

I stopped at the drugstore next door to the supermarket and bought a few items, which the clerk put into a plastic bag, along with the receipt. I tucked the bag of coffee beans into the bag as well, and carried it into the supermarket.

Now I’ve never bought loose coffee beans at the supermarket, so I’ve never had occasion to use the grinder. The grinder is a component of a display that includes dispensers containing various types of premium-grade coffee beans. You fill a bag with the beans you want, pour them into the hopper, set the dial to the desired grind, put the empty bag under the chute and push the Start button. Then you simply pay for the bag of ground coffee by weight at checkout.

But since I wasn’t buying their coffee, I opened the bag of beans I had brought with me, poured them into the hopper, filled two empty bags with ground coffee, and walked out.

It occurred to me on the way out that someone might stop me and insist that I pay for the coffee. I figured I could just show them the empty coffee bean bag I had brought in, explain that my wife had bought whole beans instead of ground coffee by mistake, and that would be satisfactory.

That’s when the light went on. I realized that if I saved the empty coffee bean bag, the next time I needed coffee, I could walk in with the empty coffee bean bag concealed somewhere. Once at the display, I could make sure no one was watching, quickly fill the empty bag with premium beans from the display, and then just proceed as though I had walked in with the bag of beans. If I get stopped on the way out, the explanation would be the same.

Of course, this won’t work if the aisle is under surveillance. It also won’t work if you’re Catholic. And if you try this, don’t get too attached to that morning cup of Hawaiian Kona - I hear that the coffee in jail really sucks.

Eyeworms

2010-10-20T19:37:00.002-05:00

Sometimes you hear a song on the radio or on television that won’t stop playing in your head. These are called “earworms,” and there are two kinds:

They start off as songs you genuinely like. But after you catch yourself humming them for the 300th time, they suddenly start to feel like houseguests who have worn out their welcome.

They’re not enjoyable, and they only get worse. These are typically advertising jingles, disco music or hook-laden teen pop songs.

No one has ever figured out how to stop an earworm, but eventually they die a natural death, only to be replaced by something else.

Lately, I’ve noticed that there are visual stimuli that have the same effect – and of course, I’m calling them “eyeworms.” The usual characteristics of an eyeworm are that they are visually discordant, conceptually irresponsible, or emotionally troubling. Take this pizza box, for example:

Can you identify my problem with this image? I can’t stop thinking about it.

There was a lot of Internet anguish over the recent redesign of the Gap logo, which leads me to believe that I’m not alone in my suffering. Would anybody like to form a support group?

Faith and Memories

2010-10-17T08:26:00.003-05:00

While I’m not particularly religious, I’m occasionally obligated to attend religious ceremonies of one sort or another. The most recent one included a brunch in the social hall attached to the house of worship. I have attended several brunches of this type in the past, and they all have one thing in common: a high percentage of very friendly older people.

I suspect the high percentage is due to the fact that religion was more popular back in the days when stores were closed on Sunday and only rich people had television sets. The friendly behavior can be attributed to the fact that churches were once the social networking hub of choice before the Internet - which explains the existence of the social hall. Also, by the time people reach a certain age, they’ve lost most of their close friends and crave human contact.

We went through the buffet line and sat at a table occupied by several older people. The couple sitting next to us immediately introduced themselves, and we made the usual small talk.

Eventually, an elderly man left the table. The woman I had been talking to leaned over and said, “It’s so sad that he has to come to services alone. His wife has Alzheimer’s.”

The conversation took on a serious note as we both talked about this tragic disease, and the people we knew who had been affected.

After a somber lull, we gradually returned to casual small talk. The woman asked me where we were from, assuming we had come from out of town for the ceremony. “Oh, we live right here in the Orlando area,” I responded.

“Where do you live?” she inquired, realizing that we weren’t going to enjoy an extended conversation about Chicago or Dallas.

I told her the name of our suburb, and she reacted with surprise. “So do we!” She exclaimed.

“Oh, what a coincidence!” I replied. “What neighborhood?”

A weird look came over her face, and she stammered, “Uhh…umm… it’s… uhhh…”

She turned to her husband and asked, “What’s the name of our neighborhood?”

He looked up from his plate and said, “Umm… it’s called…uhh…it’s near the golf course.”

“Which golf course?” I asked, helpfully (there are three).

“Umm…we don’t actually live on the fairway, but we’re near it. It’s called…uhh…”

Worried now, I asked the name of their street, which she was able to name. Then I asked for the name of the nearest major cross-street, and she named that as well. This was all the information I needed, so I told them the name of the golf course and the name of their neighborhood.

They reacted with relieved glee, happy that the embarrassing moment had passed. But the next time I attend a ceremony there, I don’t expect to see either of them.

Dizzy Pills

2010-10-13T18:10:00.002-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I developed an ear infection, which caused me to experience dizzy spells. The doctor prescribed a couple of medications for me, one of which was intended to control the dizzy symptoms. They work very well, so I didn’t stop to read the label until today.

For those of you who may have difficulty reading this small image, it says:

“Take 1 to 2 tablet(s) by mouth 4 times daily as needed for dizziness.”

However, one of the listed side effects states:

“May cause dizziness.”

My daughter hasn’t started taking birth control pills yet, but once she does, I’m going to read the side effects very carefully.

Insufficiently Free

2010-10-12T19:06:00.002-05:00

My wife and I like to go to a local movie theater that offers a discounted price on Sundays. The normal price for Monday to Saturday is $9.50. The Sunday price is $5.00. It’s a pretty good deal, but I sweeten it even further.

The theater is part of a national chain that offers a “reward points” program. Every time I pay for a ticket, even a discounted ticket, I earn points. The points accumulate and eventually they give me a coupon for a free bag of popcorn, a free drink, etc. About a month ago, I was awarded a free movie ticket that I can use any time. But I never will.

There are two reasons that this ticket will never be used. The first reason is that the theater chain limits the movies for which I can redeem the ticket. If it’s a first-run popular film with a good cast and a big marketing budget, the corporate bigwigs decided that they’d rather sell the seats than give them away. So those films are restricted until they’ve been around for a month or so. By then, I will have paid my five bucks if I want to see it at all.

The second reason that I’ll never use the ticket is that I’m married to a woman who doesn’t completely understand the concept of “free.”

The first time I tried to use it was on one of our regular Sunday visits to the theater. “Don’t use that free ticket!” she scolded. “If you use it on Sunday, you’re only saving five dollars. Use it on a regular-price night.”

“I don’t think you understand,” I explained. “It’s a free ticket. I’m not saving anything. Free is free. The movie isn’t any different whether it costs $9.50 to get in, or $5.00 to get in. It’s FREE.”

“No,” she insisted. “If you use it on a regular-price night, you’re saving $9.50.”

I gave up. I didn’t have the heart to remind her that I have achieved senior-discount status, so by her logic, I’m only saving $6.50. And if I do tell her, I’m afraid she’ll put me to work designing a time machine.

Shoes and Ink

2010-10-05T22:07:00.001-05:00

I have a couple of pairs of nice dress shoes. They’re well-made, nicely designed, and they cost $35 a pair. If the heels ever wear down to the point where they need to be replaced, or if I ever get a hole in the sole, it will be cheaper to buy new shoes than to have them repaired.

This is because the United States priced itself out of the labor market for the manufacture of shoes. People in Indonesia will happily make shoes for a fraction of the wage an American worker would demand. Back when I was a kid, we would have a pair of dress shoes re-soled or re-heeled four or five times over their lifespan. I hardly bother to shine them anymore. If they start looking a little scuffed up, I go shoe-shopping.

Over this past weekend, my printer ran out of ink. It’s an all-in-one unit that functions as a printer, a copier and a scanner. But it’s been giving me problems lately, because the printer drivers aren’t fully supported on my new computer, which came with a new operating system.

When I drove to the store, I discovered that a pair of ink cartridges would cost me $55. I took a walk down the printer aisle and found an all-in-one printer for sale that costs $69 and includes two ink cartridges. It’s brand-new, prints faster, works with my operating system and includes a fax in addition to all of the other functions. Better still, new cartridges for it only cost $39 a pair. Guess what I did.

It’s rapidly reaching the point where the cost of production of printers is outpacing the greedy pricing for replacement cartridges. In a few years, I expect to see a printer on the market that has no replaceable cartridges at all. It will come with a “lifetime supply” of ink. I can’t believe that someone in Indonesia hasn’t figured out a way to make printer cartridges dirt cheap.

I don’t want the world to work this way. I should be able to repair my shoes and feed ink to my printer at reasonable cost. But I can’t. People will say this is a flaw in the capitalist system, others will say it’s a symptom of American consumer culture, and others will say it’s a failure of government to impose proper import duties or regulate business. I have no idea. But if you think it’s a problem with government, let me know and I’ll send them a fax.

Tire Pressure Procedure

2010-09-26T09:39:00.003-05:00

We all assume we know how to perform new, simple tasks, constructing a procedure in our minds before we start. And of course, we often have to revise that procedure once we start and discover what my friend Dan refers to as “the hidden bummer factor.”

My wife told me that a light on her dashboard indicated that a tire was low, and asked me to go out and fill it. I’ve completed this task a hundred times, but I remember the first time. I assumed that the procedure consisted of:

Drive to filling station.

Find out how much air to put in the tires.

Put quarters in the air machine.

Fill up tires.

Drive home.

But after the first trip, I had to modify the procedure, adding a new Step 1: “Bring quarters.”

To determine the tire pressure, I assumed that the tire would be the best source of this information. I tried reading the cryptic embossed codes on the side of the tire, then gave up and looked it up in the owner’s manual. The owner’s manual instructed me to look for a placard inside the driver’s side door jamb – an easy solution.

Once I fed the quarters into the air machine, I discovered that I had to remove the valve stem caps, which consumed time, so the air machine shut off before I was finished. This meant that I had to modify the procedure again, inserting a new step before putting in the quarters: “Remove valve stem caps.” And of course, I had to insert another step before driving home: “Replace valve stem caps.”

I now had a procedure that has served me well for a quarter of a century. When my wife asked me to fill her tire the other day, I gathered a handful of quarters and drove to the filling station. After glancing at the tire pressure placard, I dutifully walked around the car, removing all of the valve stem caps. I set them on top of the tire, so that I don’t kick them away or step on them as I hustle to fill the tires before the time runs out on the air machine.

Ready to complete the task, I walked up to the air machine and discovered that after all this time, I had to add a new step to the procedure. Taped to the air machine was a hand-written note: “Out of order.”

Under 200

2010-09-19T11:43:00.001-05:00

One of the side benefits of my knee surgery is that I lost about 20 pounds. This is the result of a combination of factors, including unappetizing hospital food, narcotic pain medication and a lack of desire to stand up, walk to the kitchen and raid the refrigerator. I’ve since gained about 5 of those pounds back, but I still weigh less than 200 pounds for the first time in 20 years. I’m determined to keep it off.

However, I had to put new holes in my belts, because all of my pants have an embarrassing tendency to slide off my hips. Because I’m not completely confident in my ability to maintain this new figure, I’ve been unwilling to shop for new pants.

Last week, I received an e-mail from the Managing Director of my department, who is flying down from the New York office to visit the Florida office. It was an invitation, sent to about seven peon-level employees, to join her for dinner at a tony nearby restaurant. The invitation was marked, “Your attendance is required.”

Our office dress code is “business casual,” but I worried whether the normal dress code would be acceptable for this dinner. I conferred with other employees on the invitation list, to try and determine if it would be appropriate to wear a suit for the occasion. The majority opinion was that I would look like a “tool” or a “dork,” but one person who works with Managing Directors all the time said that it would be “expected.” So I’m torn (so to speak).

OK, let’s be clear about one thing: I never wear suits, except to funerals and certain formal events that I can’t avoid. Because I wear them so infrequently, I have one suit (black wool pinstripe) and one sports coat (brown corduroy). I used to have three suits, but the others were getting kind of threadbare, so we gave them to Goodwill.

I tried the suit on about an hour ago. I can pull the pants away from my stomach about 2 inches. They look ridiculously huge on me, like clown pants. The dinner is tomorrow night, so it’s too late to have them altered. The corduroy sports coat is too informal for a business dinner. So I guess I’ll just wear normal attire and pray that I won’t be underdressed.

I’ve since learned that one of the peons invited to the dinner won’t be attending, due to a prior “religious obligation.” Another individual is aggressively ambitious, and is expected to try and monopolize the conversation – something that the Managing Director is known to dislike intensely. So it now appears that I could show up in Bermuda shorts and a Bob Marley t-shirt, and still won’t attract attention.

Pregnant Robot

2010-08-14T14:33:00.001-05:00

My knees didn’t go bad all at once; it was a slow decline over a period of about five years. During that time, I slowly developed numerous coping mechanisms to avoid the pain that occurred when the bones in my knees ground together. This resulted in a stiff-legged hobble, and a tendency to lift my hip to step up over a curb, rather than bend my knee. Now, I’m struggling to ditch those bad habits.

My wife says that with my new knee joints, I walk “like a robot.” This is from a fear of becoming off-balance, and having to make a sudden, possibly painful, corrective move. My physical therapist tells me that I walk “like a pregnant woman,” because I still want to use the stiff-legged hobbling walk, and I tend to splay my legs to maintain balance.

So I use this “pregnant robot” criticism as a motivational tool to try and correct my gait. My physical therapist goads me into walking around the house “like a man,” lengthening my stride, lifting my feet as though stepping over a box of Kleenex, swinging my arms, and swiveling my head from side to side to force me to make balance corrections. It feels unnatural after so many years of cautious pain-avoidance. I feel like a comedian doing an exaggerated manly walk.

Despite my challenge to walk normally, my physical therapist has dubbed me “the poster child for bilateral knee replacement.” One reason she feels this way is that I’ve recovered a great deal of strength, and I’ve developed excellent knee flexion. Normal people can flex their knees to around 160 degrees. The anticipated maximum for knee replacement patients is around 130 degrees (due to limitations in the artificial joint). Currently, I can flex 134 degrees. I’m going to try and achieve even more flexion, because there are so many things I need to do around the house that involve squatting or kneeling back on my heels (kneeling is currently not a pleasant experience).

Unfortunately, I’m falling short of the goal for knee extension. Almost everyone can extend their legs to zero degrees (legs straight). Normal people actually exceed zero degrees when standing, “locking” their knees by bending the leg backward a few degrees. My physical therapist tells me that recovering this ability after knee replacement surgery is crucial, to avoid the possibility of the knees buckling. She also tells me that it’s the hardest goal to achieve, and I believe her. She has me sit on a chair, legs extended, my heels resting on another chair. Then she holds a measuring device up to my leg and presses down hard on the knee. Yeah, it hurts.

I’ve been going a little stir-crazy at home. My wife strictly forbade me to drive a car until my physical therapist said it was OK (my surgeon said it was OK weeks ago). Eventually, the two of them agreed that I was capable of driving, so I gratefully ran errands rather than sit home and watch TV. My boss told me that I’m not allowed to go into the office while on Short Term Disability, because of the insurance liability. So I got my doctor’s office to sign a “Return to Work” certificate, which means that on Monday, I’m officially off Short Term Disability and back to work. I wonder if my company’s insurance covers pregnant robots.

Yoof

2010-08-04T20:46:00.000-05:00

Once safely at home, I made it my business to move around on the walker as much as possible. Sitting on the edge of the bed, all I had to do was grit my teeth and make the transition from sitting to standing, the hardest and most painful part. After I’m vertical, there’s not much pain and I can shuffle around the house pretty much at will.

I was visited by the highly competent Home Health Care nurse, who inspected my incisions, took my vitals, and arranged for my doctor to issue prescriptions for the meds I’d need during my recovery. This included a bag of syringes preloaded with an expensive medication intended to prevent blood clots. She demonstrated the injection, and on her next visit, taught me to give it to myself, into a pinched roll of belly fat (which I have in abundance).

It’s surprisingly easy, although lots of my friends go white-faced at the mere idea of injecting themselves. The hardest thing is avoiding “reflex bounce.” This is where you jab in the needle, but before you can inject the medicine, you reflexively yank it out, and then have to jab yourself again.

The Home Health Care nurse came by daily for about 4 days, then every other day for a little while, and then stopped coming altogether, due to my dramatic improvements.

The Home Health Care physical therapist came by daily as well, giving me instructions on using the walker, and supervising a series of exercises to develop flexibility and strength. She’s a slim Filipina woman, gentle and encouraging, but she makes me work like a rented mule.

A friend of ours from Boston came down to visit for a week, providing much-needed distractions from the tedium of daytime TV. She and my wife shared the duty of ensuring that I did my exercises as required.

I made rapid progress. By the end of the first week home, I could get out of a chair easily, walk short distances without the walker, and leave the house occasionally. Today, nearing the end of three weeks since the surgery, I no longer require the walker (or a cane) for anything. I’ve been encouraged to use the stationary bicycle (with zero resistance) and swim in the pool for exercise.

Strangely, although I’ve always been a strong swimmer, I seem to have lost my flutter kick. I had an anxious moment in the deep end of the pool, where I was holding on to a float and tried to swim to the side, but just hovered there in the middle, not moving, wondering if I should call out for help. Eventually, was able to thrash my way to the stairs.

I can simulate a normal walking gait, though at this point it’s a bit less painful to walk with a pronounced limp.

People in the hospital, the nursing home and Home Health Care have been very impressed with my progress, which everyone attributes to my age. One large Jamaican nurse, watching me struggle to my feet on the walker, said “Dot’s yoof working for you, mon.”

My physical therapist comes by every other day now, and has transitioned me to rubber-band exercises. These are wide bands about three feet long, color-coded yellow, red, green and blue. The colors represent the thickness of the rubber (yellow is the thinnest). She’ll make a loop of one, wrap it around my ankles, and have me fight the resistance of the rubber to spread my legs. Or she’ll loop it around a chair leg and an ankle and have me straighten my leg from the knee. We’ve been moving through the color spectrum for the past week, and we’re on green, which is really hard. “Next time blue,” she threatened me today. Thank God I have my yoof.

Rehab, Part 4: The Metaphor

2010-08-03T08:56:00.002-05:00

To my wife’s great credit, she took my demands seriously. Her eyes opened to the incompetence, the deficiencies, the indifference. We rang the Call button at one point and waited 20 minutes without a visit from an attendant. My wife stormed off to the desk and found one of the attendants there, who had set down a clipboard in such a way as to cover the Call light panel.

Before long, we had the administrator in my room, apologizing. I demanded to know what plan, if any, existed for my physical therapy. I had been there for 16 hours and nobody had thought to discuss it with me. Her response was, “The physical therapist comes in at 3. You can talk to him then.”

“Four more hours?” I sputtered. “I have to spend almost a full day here before someone is available to discuss my treatment program? Once again I have to ask if anyone in this place knew I was coming.”

The administrator again began a series of useless apologies, and suggested that we might be more satisfied with Home Health Care. I suspect that she would be thrilled to see us leave, since all I had done since my arrival was point out the gaping holes in her carefully-wrought treatment facility.

At that very moment, I became aware of a change in my body – a movement, a gurgle, a pressure – and realized that my long-awaited bowel movement was about to arrive. For six days, this reluctant slug of feces had resisted daily doses of stool softener and laxatives, hindered by anesthesia and pain medication. And now, during the discussions of my release from the nursing home hellhole, it had broken free of its bonds and was cruising towards freedom, a metaphor in transit.

I had to interrupt the discussion and request privacy. The curtain was drawn around my bed, and I painfully slid myself over and onto the commode – a maneuver I had not yet tried. Once enthroned, I had to conduct my business while listening to the discussions continuing on the other side of the curtain.

Within minutes, a great wave of relief washed over me, and I was able to return to the itchy, uncomfortable nursing home bed with a sense of accomplishment. The discussions between my wife and the administrator had resulted in an agreement, and the paperwork for my release was being prepared. The bowel movement was merely the icing on the cake (sorry, that was irresistible).

During the wait for the paperwork, the physical therapist arrived. He was a nice guy, intelligent, committed and probably good at his work. Had our paths crossed the previous day, it might have changed the outcome of this story.

Almost exactly 24 hours after I had been admitted to the nursing home, I was released. A male attendant helped me into a wheelchair, and I literally burned rubber on that thing heading for the exit.

I cannot adequately describe the feeling of returning home. I was able to use the walker to get from the car to our bed, and I lay there in ecstatic gratitude. I told my wife that if the day ever came where she had to decide whether or not to put me in a nursing home, she should just give me list of things to pick up at Costco, and then cut the brake lines on the car.

Rehab, Part 3: Economics

2010-08-02T10:16:00.004-05:00

I had a fitful, sleepless night with little relief from my pain medication. Earlier, I mentioned the two unused desks in the room, each of which had an equally-unused trash can in the kneehole. I had asked an attendant to move one of the trash cans near my bed, so that I could discard the tissue I used whenever I employed the urinal.

Early in the morning, a woman came in to replace the plastic liners in the trash cans. This was a fruitless task, because there was normally nothing in either can. She looked slowly around the room for the missing trash can, eventually finding it next to my bed. She replaced the liner, and then, as she had done hundreds of times before, put the trash can under the desk across the room, where it was useless to me.

“Miss?” I called to her, “Will you put the trash can next to my bed where you found it so that I can use it to dispose of these tissues?”

She nodded, picked up the trash can and then, perhaps from force of habit, slid it underneath the bedside commode, where I couldn’t reach it. I had slumped back onto the bed, and didn’t notice until she had gone. I spent the morning tossing used tissues onto the floor in frustrated attempts to make a Larry Bird hook shot.

I use this example to illustrate a sad reality I had begun to observe about the nursing home: After my stay in the hospital, everything seemed substandard, cut back to the thinnest veneer of quality. Nursing homes take the Social Security check of each resident to pay for their care. It's not much, probably less than $30 a day. To make a profit, they have to reduce costs.

The bed was narrow and uncomfortable, the sheets were rough – seemingly a blend of burlap and asbestos. Believe me, you notice such things when you’re bedridden.

There was a pervasive odor – a mixture of urine and cleaning products – that I’ve decided to call “pissinfectant.” The food was all canned glop poured over pasta.

But the worst example of nursing home economics was the staff. There was an administrator and a nurse on duty during the night. Everyone else appeared to be trained zombies.

They were undoubtedly minimum-wage jobs, which were boring, repetitive and demeaning. So the quality of people who take those jobs are the borderline retarded - those who take comfort in routine, unchallenged by novelty or crises. They plod numbly through their days, changing diapers and bed linens, moving patients to the dining room or the TV room, bathing the patients occasionally, and then returning them to their rooms for the night.

Earlier that night, before I tried to sleep, I asked an attendant to strap on my leg straighteners, which are reinforced wraps that are closed by Velcro straps. She held one up and turned it around and around, trying to figure out how to put it on.

“You lay it flat on the bed,” I instructed, “with the foam pad facing up. Narrow end by the ankle, wide end by the upper thigh. Then you lift my leg onto it and strap it closed.”

She continued to turn it around and around, her brain struggling with the complex geometry necessary to distinguish “wide” from “narrow.” Eventually, I had to pull myself up painfully and arrange it for her.

I had complained about the stifling heat in the room, so they sent a maintenance guy later that day. He looked at the air conditioner and declared that it was set to 60 degrees. “Yes, I can see that,” I said, patiently. “But it’s not 60 in here, is it?”

He and I stared at each other, a classic Mexican standoff. He eventually mumbled something and left, but it was a moot issue. I had made up my mind.

When my wife arrived around 10 a.m. to see how I was settling in, I pulled her close to me and said, “I want out of here right now. Right now. Sign any papers you have to sign, get me in a wheelchair and take me home. I’m not staying here another night.”

Rehab, Part 2: The Call Button

2010-08-01T16:00:00.002-05:00

The ambulance team wheeled me down a long corridor to an end room. There were two beds, one occupied by an elderly man with advanced Alzheimer’s Disease, unable to walk, talk, or feed himself. The team lifted me into the unoccupied bed, gathered their equipment and left.

I took a few minutes to assess my situation. My inflamed knees were screaming for pain meds, and my five-day constipation struggle had put me into a foul mood. The room felt absurdly hot, even though there was an air-conditioning unit next to my bed that was set to 60 degrees. There were no amenities near the bed – no tray table, no bedside commode, no urinal, no walker, no wheelchair.

Across the room were two desks, clearly unused by any resident since they were assembled 10 years ago. My roommate’s desk had a small TV, loudly blaring an episode of Little House on the Prairie. At every commercial break, an older man and woman dressed in conservative clothing thanked the viewers for watching the show, “depicting the early pioneer days of American history, based on the core biblical values of faith and family.” They would then ask for donations to enable them to continue such programming. That was it – no other advertising.

I decided to deal with the medication issue first, and reached for the Call button. There wasn’t one. Horrified, I started to call out: “HEY! ANYBODY THERE?” Down the hall I could hear other elderly residents in various stages of dementia take up the call, like so many magpies: “Heeeeyyyy! Hellooooo! HEY!” It occurred to me that the attendants had long ago learned to ignore them.

I yelled myself raw for about 10 minutes before somebody showed up. Red-faced, I demanded to know why there was no Call button. “Were you not expecting me today?” I sputtered. “What if I had a medical emergency?” The attendant listened to me, wide-eyed, and then said she would go get the nurse. The nurse waddled in, an older woman with the spreading thighs of a desk-bound bureaucrat.

“You don’t have a Call button? She asked. “I guess we should find one for you.”

Once the Call button was hooked up, the nurse turned to me and asked the stupidest question imaginable: “Is there anything else you need?”

“Well, we can start with the reason I wanted the Call button in the first place,” I snarled. “I need my pain medication.”

“It’s not here yet,” she said. “We had to order it.”

Once again, I was dumbfounded. “You’ve had all day to prepare for my arrival!” I was red-faced now, and shouting. “If you’re unable to provide the basic essentials for my care, I should never have been transferred here! Has anyone read my chart? I’m not ambulatory! I’ve been constipated for a week, and I could launch this torpedo at any time! How were you planning to handle my bathroom visits? Is someone going to bring a wheelchair and take me to the bathroom?”

“No,” she told me, “we can’t do that because you haven’t been trained how to transfer from a wheelchair to a toilet yet. Too dangerous.”

“OK!” I exclaimed. “Got it! Now what the hell is Plan B?”

“I suppose we could find you a bedside commode,” she suggested hesitantly.

“Excellent idea. Why don’t you do that, and while you’re at it, find out when exactly my meds will arrive.”

I lay there fuming, while the wide-eyed attendant watched me from across the room, fully expecting my head to explode. I get the impression that most residents don’t possess the capacity to complain, and this was a new phenomenon.

The nurse returned shortly with a commode, which they placed next to my bed, along with a tray table and a urinal. By then it was 9 p.m. The nurse told me my meds should arrive within an hour and a half, and then they got the hell out of there.

The meds showed up at 2:20 a.m., by which time I was sobbing from the pain and discomfort.

Rehab, Part 1: Rock Star

2010-07-31T07:53:00.003-05:00

After four days in the hospital, I had reached the point where all I really required was physical therapy in addition to basic human needs. So on the morning of the fifth day, my wife drove off to inspect a few Inpatient Rehab facilities. She was back by 10:00 a.m., proudly declaring that she had found the ideal place. But there was just one little unpleasant detail.

It seems that in Florida, there’s no such thing as an Inpatient Rehab center. Instead, there are nursing homes that have a resident physical therapist. Nursing homes love to fill a bed with a temporary rehab client, because insurance companies pay them far more than the Social Security of the other residents (who are also temporary).

Still, I didn’t see a downside. I’ve been inside nursing homes before. Yes, they’re depressing. Yes, they sometimes abuse the residents. But nobody was going to abuse me, and I was anxious to get started on a focused program of exercise so that I could get up out of bed and walk.

I had my wife pack my belongings, and I was ready to go by noon. But for some reason, it took a long time to arrange the transfer. For one thing, they had to schedule an ambulance pickup, because my wife had an appointment and was unavailable to drive me. “Ambulance?” I sputtered. “Why not call a cab? It’s only 5 exits away!” But for some reason, hospitals don’t work that way.

So I sat, fuming and dithering until 6 p.m., when the ambulance arrived with three attendants. One was a snotty and officious small man who liked to bark orders, another was an older guy who had found retirement too boring, and then there was the stoner.

The three of them lifted me on a sheet and slid me onto the gurney. While buckling me in, the older guy leaned across my body and set his elbow down exactly on my left-knee incision. He apologized profusely, declaring that he of all people should have known better.

They wheeled me out of the hospital into the blazing afternoon heat, and loaded me into the ambulance, which was like an oven inside. The stoner sat in the back with me, trying to connect me to a battery-powered device that measures pulse rate and blood oxygen level. The device kept shutting off, and the stoner would respond by smacking it with the heel of his hand until it lit up again. However, the numbers were screwy and unreliable, so after a few more smacks he stuck an oxygen hose in my nose “just in case.”

“I’m not an accident victim,” I told him. “My blood oxygen is fine.”

“Yeah, but I can’t confirm that with this thing,” he explained, waving the sporadically-blinking box. “Better safe than sorry.”

The ambulance, which has the exact same suspension system as that of a dump truck, bounced and rattled up the interstate, sending my knees into spasms of pain. I hadn't anticipated this problem, and hadn’t taken a pain pill since 9 a.m. By the time we arrived, I was writhing.

The attendants slid me out of the ambulance, lowered the wheels to the ground, and tilted the gurney so that my feet were lower than my head. It felt like I was floating six feet in the air. A small crowd of wheelchair-bound residents gaped in wonder and delight at my arrival, waving and smiling toothless smiles. I felt a strange euphoria, like a rock star, threading my way in a limo through crowds of groupies outside the stage entrance. It must have been all that extra oxygen.

Recovery Ward

2010-07-30T08:33:00.004-05:00

In the hospital, time quickly lost all meaning. I had a clock and a window to mark the passing of hours and days, but hospitals run around the clock.

Sleep was only possible in short, sporadic increments, because something was always going on. Thanks to my passing-out episode, the doctors decided to conduct numerous tests to eliminate the possibility that I had suffered a stroke, heart attack or embolism. This meant that someone came in frequently to take my blood pressure, pulse and temperature, and I had to give blood samples daily. Before long, I had track marks all over both arms.

However, the nurse presented me with the World’s Third-Greatest Invention. First is fire. Second is the wheel. Third is the bedside urinal. There was a bathroom in my room, but it might as well have been in orbit around Saturn. I never saw the inside of it.

Once the nurse removed my catheter, I was given instructions to drink water as often as I could. I quickly became adept at using the urinal, except for the times that I was strapped in to the mechanical leg benders. Then it was like trying to shoot a target from a moving horse.

Every couple of hours, a nurse would come in and pick up the urinal. She’d swish it around and hold it up to the light to check the color, clarity and quantity like a sommelier, and then she’d empty it for me. I kept thinking how funny it would be if she were to say something like, “Hmm. You had fun in college, didn’t you?”

I have to say that the nurses were all smart, cheerful, and professional, and they’d materialize within seconds to attend to my every need when I pressed the Call button. Whenever the shift changed, the duty nurse would come in with his or her replacement and introduce them, which was nice touch.

Meals were delivered to my bed, and they were all of uniform quality. Not good, not bad, but you wouldn’t want to have to eat it every day. Fortunately, I didn’t have much of an appetite.

My only genuine criticism of hospital operations was that physical therapy was kind of basic and haphazard. I was strapped in to the mechanical leg benders every day for six hours at a stretch, which is just too long. Also, once every day (never at the same time of day), two physical therapists would hoist me onto the walker for a short, excruciating shuffle. The biggest problem was that no attempt was made to coordinate the strenuous activities with doses of pain medication. Sometimes I was properly medicated; other times I was not.

I was in the hospital for five days. By the fifth day, I could walk with assistance up and down the hospital corridor on the walker, which seemed like astonishing progress. I was eager to begin a genuine physical therapy program, so we discussed the two options with the hospital social worker. One option was Home Health Care, where a nurse and a physical therapist provide services to the patient at home. The other option was Inpatient Rehab, where the patient is given a bed, meals and other services in addition to nursing and physical therapy. We chose Inpatient Rehab, because at that point, caring for me would be a huge effort for my wife, especially if it involved moving me.

We chose wrong, as you’ll see in my next post.

The Pain Scale

2010-07-23T18:58:00.001-05:00

Throughout the recovery process, I’m constantly being asked to rate my pain on a 0 – 10 scale. But they always ask me to define “10” as “the worst pain you’ve ever felt.” It seems too subjective to me, because a “10” for a guy who has never given birth might seem like a “4” to a woman who has.

By the second day after surgery, the anesthesia had mostly worn off. The nurse gave me a gizmo that looked like a bong and told me to suck on it, trying to keep a floating yellow bead between two markers. Supposedly, this would open my lungs and expel the remainder of the anesthesia. “Do that ten times an hour,” she said, and left. Ten times? Every hour? Maybe this thing is a bong.

Later that day, the physical therapists returned to get me up on the walker again. I gritted my teeth for the effort, and was extremely displeased to discover that without the benefit of lingering anesthesia, the pain was easily double that of the previous attempt. One of the therapists kept insisting that I “breathe” and “keep my eyes open” as I gasped and moaned, shuffling over to the chair beside the bed.

Sweating and shuddering from the pain, I waited for the inevitable trip back, the physical therapists constantly asking me to rate my pain. “That was a nine,” I sobbed, believing that a ten would be so intolerable, I’d never live to describe it.

Within a few minutes, the physical therapists hoisted me to my feet again. My head swam from the searing pain. My eyes clouded with floating multicolored spots, and off in the distance, I could hear one of the therapists insisting that I breathe. I was able to blurt out the words, “I’m going to pass out.”

I came to on the bed, one of the therapists waving something under my nose that looked like a paint chip, but which had no discernable odor. After that episode, the physical therapists still visited me every day, but took a far less aggressive approach to getting me up on the walker.

The next day, I was visited by a nurse who told me they were going to remove the “drains” from my incisions. These are small tubes designed to divert any body fluids to collection bags outside the body, preventing them from pooling up inside the incision. “This is going to hurt,” she told me. And it sure did. Maybe a 7. Piece of cake.

“Let me dispose of these,” she said, coiling up the tubes, “and I’ll come back and remove your catheter.”

My what? I groped beneath the blankets and discovered the tube coming out of my penis. How could I not know it was there? How did it get in there?

The nurse returned, and started handling my private parts with practiced professionalism. “Ready?” she asked. On a pain scale, it was about a 4. I’ll spare you the grotesque imagery of the procedure, but I will say that I wish to God I hadn't watched.

Introduction to Medical Equipment

2010-07-23T06:23:00.002-05:00

Coming out of general anesthesia is always interesting, although not always pleasant. The symptoms differ depending on the drugs employed. I’ve only experienced it twice. This time, I had a problem with eye roll. It was like an old TV set with a broken vertical hold. Faces of nurses and doctors just floated up from the bottom of my visual field and disappeared off the top.

I was given a button connected to a morphine pump. They told me that every six minutes, I could push the button to deliver a tiny amount of morphine my bloodstream. But because of the anesthesia, I wasn’t remembering instructions very well. My wife broke the rules by taking control of the button to keep my pain under control.

After several hours of fading in and out of consciousness, my surgeon came in and asked if I wanted to try to stand on the new replacement knees. Seriously, doc – would you? I think they phrase it like that so it seems as though it was all your idea.

Nurses gathered up the wires and tubes connecting me to various appliances in the room, two physical therapists held me under the armpits, and lifted me to a standing position behind a walker, which I grasped like a drowning man.

People seem curious about the pain. It was blinding, overwhelming, stunning. But it wasn’t the worst pain I have ever felt; I wouldn’t experience that until the following day.

There was a reclining chair adjacent to the hospital bed, and the P/Ts coached me through a heavily-assisted 90-degree turn, and then I was directed to sit in the chair. I plopped down, gasping from the pain and the effort, and was allowed to rest there for two hours. Then, the P/Ts rejoined me for the return trip to the bed.

It was much worse getting up that second time, because every cell in my body knew what was coming. I cursed and sweated, struggling that three feet back to the bed.

After another short rest, the staff introduced me to four pieces of equipment that I shall hate for the rest of my life. I call them the “squeezers,” the “freezers,” the “straighteners” and the “benders.”

The squeezers are two air bladders that are wrapped around each lower leg. A small pump inflates one, which tightens around the leg briefly, and is then deflated. The process is repeated on the other leg, alternating all night long. The purpose of this device is to keep the blood moving on bedridden patients to prevent blood clots. But the truth is that the bladders rub on the skin a little bit when they inflate, over and over, until you want to scream.

The freezers are four pads about the size of ping-pong paddles, connected through a series of hoses to small refrigeration units. Two pads are placed on either side of each knee, and refigerated liquid is pumped through them all night long. They reduce swelling, but they also refrigerate the blood of the patient. I suffered from painful bouts of uncontrollable shivering, despite being covered with five blankets.

The straighteners are reinforced wraps that cover the entire leg, preventing it from bending. These are strapped on all night, to prevent involuntary movements that might disrupt the healing process. They’re horrible, because they pretty much prevent every other kind of movement, voluntary or not.

The benders are machines that slowly bend the leg to a programmable angle, over and over again, up to six hours a day on each leg. There are several designs for these machines, but in my experience, the best ones are those that have no scrotum-pinching parts.

Surgery

2010-07-21T20:19:00.004-05:00

It starts with a subtle realization that you can’t walk or run as far as you used to. You make excuses, “I’m not a kid anymore,” or “I’m not in such a big hurry.” And then, one day, your wife asks you to take a long walk on the beach.

OK, I’ve always hated long walks on the beach for two reasons:

The beach is the same a mile from where I am now.

Long walks on the beach only sound romantic; real romance is inside you, a very short walk if you know where you’re going.

But when my wife asked me for a long walk on the beach about 3 years ago, I had to discard all of my curmudgeon arguments. I turned her down because I realized my knees couldn’t take it. The knees have gotten progressively worse, a steady decline that most recently found me following my wife around Costco in one of those electric shopping carts. It wasn’t very romantic.

So last Thursday, I found myself lying on a hospital gurney in the surgical prep area of major local hospital. Tubes and wires stuck into me everywhere, and a petite young woman was busily shaving my legs in preparation for knee replacement surgery. I have lots of stories about this experience. Not all of them will be funny. Some are icky.

This one starts just a little icky.

After my legs had been completely shaved, I asked the nurse if it was too late for me to attempt a bowel movement. I hadn’t had my normal morning cup of coffee, because I had been forbidden to eat or drink anything for the last 7 hours. This had thrown me off schedule, and despite my best efforts, I was unsuccessful. I would remain unsuccessful for six days, because anesthesia and pain medication can result in miserable constipation.

Returning in defeat to the gurney, I was visited by my surgeon. About 12 years ago, when my daughter was in first grade, we met a lot of parents, some of whom were outside of our social strata. But we socialized with them anyway, because our kids liked each other, resulting in lots of birthday parties and other get-togethers. My surgeon was one of those parents. I don’t like him, personally – but he’s the best, so I hired him.

He walked away making some notes, and another man about the same age approached, dressed in surgical scrubs. He stepped forward and introduced himself as my anesthesiologist. I suddenly realized that he was the father of yet another of my daughter’s first-grade friends. I’ve been to his house and enjoyed his beer. It was a strange moment as we sheepishly caught up. Later, as my wife entered the building to join me, she ran into an oncologist who was the father of still another of my daughter’s first-grade friends.

Anyway, that’s all I remember until I woke up in recovery 3 hours later, with throbbing knees, a sore throat and a tube coming out of my penis.

Sawbones

2010-07-14T20:03:00.001-05:00

Tomorrow morning at 5 a.m., I must report to the hospital to have new knees put in.

The doctor will saw chunks off the bones of my upper and lower leg, and then replace the chunks with parts made of chromium-cobalt alloy. Then he’ll stick in a pad made of high-density plastic to replace the cartilage that has worn away, sew me up and have the orderly wheel me to the physical therapy torture chamber.

I’ve been anxious about it all week, and my mood has not improved as various pieces of medical equipment are delivered to the house:

A walker.

A bedside commode.

A flexible knee wrap with a pump that circulates ice water around my inflamed knee.

A Medieval-looking electric appliance that I strap onto my leg while lying in bed. It flexes the knee repetitively, forcing it to bend more than it would agree to, if it were given a vote in the matter. Two hours per knee, four times a day.

For the first week, I expect to be pretty useless, gobbling pain pills as often as the law allows. After that, I may have brief periods of mental clarity, during which I’ll attempt to blog about the experience.

Thanks for the Alligators, Walt

2010-07-05T21:27:00.002-05:00

We’ve been trying to come up with things to do for my brother during his visit that do not involve going to a theme park. Theme parks are very popular with tourists in Central Florida, but in the summer they can be brutally hot and crowded. Worse, people aren’t very imaginative, so they feel a sense of obligation to go to the expensive corporate-owned theme parks, which have huge marketing budgets to attract tourists from all over the world. These gigantic tourist traps suck up the available tourist dollars and leave nothing for locally-owned businesses or attractions.

So I took my brother to do something I’ve wanted to do since I moved to Florida in 1995: an airboat ride on Lake Jesup, which is widely regarded as the most alligator-infested lake in Central Florida.

For those of you who might not know about airboats, they are wide, flat-bottomed boats (usually aluminum) with a big automotive or aircraft engine spinning an aircraft-like propeller mounted above the water on the back of the boat. The thrust of the propeller drives the boat forward, and it’s capable of travelling at high speed, through an inch of water, or even across dry land, if necessary. This makes them ideal for swampy or marshy areas.

Here we are on the boat.

And here’s the boat captain, who sits just in front of the huge, loud propeller.

We left the dock as a scary-looking storm gathered on the opposite shore of the lake.

This was both good and bad. It was good because the heavy cloud cover kept the temperature down, with no chance of sunburn. We found out why it was bad a little later.

The captain pushed off from the dock (airboats don’t have reverse), and we slid out into the lake. We hugged the shore for a short distance, and then the captain swung the boat to the left, facing a small channel about 5 feet wide. I couldn’t believe he was going to try and squeeze our big airboat through that gap, but the boat slipped in like magic, into a little hidden backwater channel. If you look closely, you can see a heron, startled by our arrival.

The captain gunned the engine and nimbly spun the boat 90 degrees on its axis, and then motored slowly through the meandering channel. We saw several small alligators and annoyed some more birds, before emerging from the vegetation into the main body of the lake. The captain hit the throttle, and we sped quickly across the surface of the lake, our teeth clacking as we jittered over the washboard-like waves.

On the other side of the lake, we cruised through some more small channels, and saw several alligators.

The captain then told us something I didn’t know. When DisneyWorld was constructed in the late sixties, any alligators that were found had to be relocated, so they dumped them all in Lake Jesup.

As we returned from our trip, two veils of rain descended from the clouds in front of us. The airboat captain sped forward, attempting to thread the needle between them, but the two curtains closed on us as we headed for shore. When you’re travelling at 35 or 40 miles an hour, raindrops feel like someone is throwing nuts and bolts at your face. The captain stopped the boat and grabbed some tarps from a hatch. We covered ourselves and made it back to the dock, soaked from the rain, but giddy from the experience.

Kennedy Space Center, Part 3

2010-07-03T19:00:00.003-05:00

From the Apollo/Saturn V Center, we took another bus to the International Space Station building. My brother and I avoided the “space program propaganda film” by entering through a side door. The International Space Station exhibit consists of walk-through mockups of the modules that make up the space station. Each module is about the size of a cargo container, but cylindrical. There’s a central corridor, flanked on either side by standard-sized equipment bays. Everything on the space station must fit into one of these bays, including the bathroom.

I was amused by this bay, which contained only a window, prominently labeled.

Other bays contained computer equipment, science experiments and life support gear.

In one module, there was a refrigerator, a freezer and a galley, each fitted into the equipment bays. The space station modules all had a dreadful gray sameness about them that I found depressing.

After leaving the International Space Station exhibit, we caught the bus back to the visitor’s complex, and we walked over to what they call the “rocket garden.” This exhibit consists of numerous launch vehicles from the early days of the space program.

After visiting the Apollo/Saturn V Center, the collection of Mercury and Gemini-era rockets seemed ridiculously dinky and unimpressive. They looked like projects constructed by a few hobbyists in someone's back yard, which they planned to shoot off at Burning Man. It was difficult to imagine what technical achievements they represented, the army of scientists that produced them, and the massive audience that watched every launch.

I couldn’t help but notice the corrosion on one of the rockets.

Nearby was a Saturn 1B, the smaller cousin of the massive Saturn V.

For my brother, the big moment came when we stumbled upon this F-1 engine from the Saturn V. He stood, mesmerized by its size and complex system of pipes and conduits, wishing he could take it home, mount it in a big aluminum tube and shoot it off at Burning Man.

Kennedy Space Center, Part 2

2010-07-01T21:17:00.003-05:00

After viewing the launch complex, we boarded the bus again. This time, the bus took us to the Apollo/Saturn V Center, which is a long building about 4 stories tall. The bus dropped us in front of a pair of double doors, where we waited in the heat. Eventually, the doors opened, and everyone shuffled into a room with no seats, and we were forced to stand and endure what I can only call a “space program propaganda film.”

Once the film ended, we were herded through another set of doors into another room with no seats. In this room, there was a display of sixties-era control consoles from Apollo Mission Control, all of which were off – a mausoleum full of long-dead electronics.

Then, another space program propaganda film started. To my amazement, someone had wired up all of those consoles, which came to life with blinking lights and tiny black-and-white monitors.

However, once that film ended, I vowed not to stand through another one. Sure enough, if you look around before going in to an exhibit, you’ll find an entrance that bypasses the movie.

The doors finally opened, and we were admitted to the most awe-inspiring exhibit I have ever seen. Suspended horizontally above our heads was a gigantic Saturn V rocket. It’s as tall as a 36-story building. Each of these main engines is over 12 feet across.

My brother broke into a huge smile, thrilled and delighted.

We walked, gaping in wonder, down the length of the enormous machine. It was broken into stages, so that you could see each component of the launch vehicle in its entirety.

NASA clearly had some help with this exhibit, which was world-class. The presentation of the Saturn V was perfect, and the primary display was surrounded by side exhibits that would appeal to all kinds of audiences. I was intrigued by the display of things designed in the early stages of the space program, such as this helmet with multiple visors, and a spacesuit made like a suit of armor.

Compare that suit with this more contemporary Apollo mission spacesuit.

And there was this display of plaster casts of the hands of three Apollo astronauts, used to make custom-fitted gloves.

Nearby was the Apollo 14 command module, still scorched by re-entry 39 years ago.

And the inside of a Lunar Excursion Module.

The big exhibit for me was an actual sliver of moon rock that you could touch.

If you go to Kennedy Space Center, I recommend saving the Apollo/Saturn V Center for last. Once you’ve seen it, everything else seems lame by comparison, as you’ll learn in my next post.

Kennedy Space Center, Part 1

2010-06-30T21:46:00.003-05:00

My brother, despite his struggle with mental illness, has always had an intense curiosity about electronics and mechanical things. You could never enter his room barefoot, because the floor was always covered with a clutter of resistors, capacitors and vacuum tubes.

It’s hard to get him to talk about his interests these days. He takes antipsychotic medication that causes him to stare into space with his mouth open until you ask him a question. If the topic of the discussion interests him, he can often participate with energy and wit, but once the conversation lags, he’s off in another world again.

I decided to take him to Kennedy Space Center. He hadn’t expressed an interest in seeing it, but I figured that something there would stimulate him. On the drive over, we talked a little bit about the space program, and I was shocked when he named all of the rockets used by NASA from the Mercury launches through the Apollo program.

Kennedy Space Center has a visitor’s complex that is loaded with the unpleasant hallmarks of a theme park.

Mixed in with the tourist crap are some impressive displays, including these full-scale mockups of a space shuttle and its booster/fuel tank assembly.

The displays are very detailed. The underside of the shuttle is covered with thermal tiles, each of which is numbered. This is because they’re all slightly different sizes and shapes, to fit the contours of the spacecraft.

Buses run from the visitor’s complex, depositing guests at various stops along the way. The first stop was a large viewing tower, from which you could see the enormous Vehicle Assembly Building.

Not too far away was the shuttle launch pad.

Off in the distance was another launch pad that is no longer being used for shuttle launches. Rather, it’s being refitted for the Orion program. Note the double-lane gravel road curving towards the gantry. That’s the road used by the massive crawling Mobile Launch Platform that carries rockets from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launch pad. NASA is currently replacing all of the gravel, because the incredible weight of the Mobile Launch Platform has pulverized the gravel into dust, which hampers its operation.

As we climbed the tower for viewing these massive objects, my brother spied an exhibit of a shuttle engine.

“Oh wow!” he exclaimed, as we walked towards it. He then began naming parts of the insanely complicated rig, as though he worked on them in his spare time. But he had a bigger thrill later that day, as I’ll explain in my next post.

A One-Hour Cushion

2010-06-27T20:56:00.003-05:00

I arranged for my schizophrenic brother, who I call “Dustin” in this blog, to come visit Florida for a couple of weeks. It’s not as simple as buying him a ticket. Someone has to help him pack, to make sure he brings underwear and a toothbrush. The nurse at his group home has to bottle and label 2 weeks’ worth of medication. Someone has to escort him to the gate, or he’ll just wander around in the airport. And we have to make sure he’s on a direct flight.

Of course, I had to arrange to meet him at the gate in Orlando, because there was no way he’d be able to find his way to baggage claim.

I drove to the airport after work to meet his plane, allowing a cushion of one hour in case some unforeseen problem arose. Which of course is exactly what happened.

As I left the office, I realized I didn’t have enough cash in my pocket to pay for the tolls I’d encounter on the way to the airport. This meant a quick run to the bank, where I dug my wallet out of my pocket to get my ATM card. This detour was merely an annoyance, not a serious problem.

Once I got to the airport, I parked in the parking garage. The parking garage is across the street from the terminal, so I had to walk to an elevator, take the elevator down below street level, cross the street in an underground tunnel, and take an escalator up to the ticketing area. The moment I set foot in the ticketing area, I realized that I had left the piece of paper with his reservation number sitting on the seat of my car.

Because the Orlando airport was designed by arrogant engineers with Cal Tech degrees who fly on private jets and never use passenger terminals, you can’t take an escalator down to the parking garage access tunnel. Why? Because it doesn’t exist. Instead, you have to wait in a throng of sweaty tourists with screaming kids for an elevator. Sometimes you have to wait for 2 or 3 of them before you can force your way into one.

Eventually, I got to the car, grabbed the paper I needed and retraced my steps all the way back to the ticketing area. I waited in a long line of sweaty tourists with screaming kids until I was finally called to talk to a ticketing agent.

“I need a gate pass to meet a disabled passenger,” I told her. “I arranged for it ahead of time.” I then triumphantly presented the reservation confirmation.

“Certainly sir,” she smiled. “May I see your photo ID?”

There is a certain feeling that you get at moments of incredible stupidity. It starts in the pit of your stomach, and rushes upwards like vomit, but ends up feeling more like someone smacked you in the face with a 2x4. I realized that in my haste to keep on schedule, I hadn’t replaced my wallet in my pocket after stopping at the bank – I had left it on the console in my car.

I was now running terribly late, but I had to return to the throng of sweaty tourists, force my way onto an elevator, cross to the parking garage, get my wallet, and return to the ticketing area. Once there, I had to wait in line again for a ticketing agent. The ticketing agent asked for my photo ID, of course, so I took it out of my wallet and handed it to her. And she dropped it. I watched in slow motion as my driver’s license fell from her grasp, and disappeared behind the computer monitor into a slot cut into the top of the ticketing counter. She stammered, and said, “I’m so sorry! I have to call a supervisor to unlock the equipment doors. This might take some time.”

Out of time, I stepped up onto the baggage scale and peered down through the slot. I could see my driver’s license resting on top of the computer housing, just within reach. I squeezed my hand through the slot into the forbidden equipment area, grabbed my driver’s license, and slapped it into her hand. She typed on the keyboard for what seemed like an hour, and then handed me the gate pass, with the wrong flight information printed on it.

“This is wrong,” I told her. “It’s the wrong flight.”

“I know, “ she replied. “It’s just how the system works, we can’t change it.”

“But is this the right gate for the flight I’m meeting?” I asked.

She looked at me as though I had somehow lost my mind, and then, as though explaining to a child, she said, “No, none of that information is correct. It’s just how the system works. We can’t change it.”

Trying not to scream my frustration, I asked her, “Then how am I supposed to know which gate?”

The ticketing agent then turned to her computer and typed for another half hour. “Gate 92 sir, have a nice flight.” I guess she forgot that I wasn’t going anywhere.

Frantic about the delay, I had to wait in the absurd security line, and hobble on my ancient, arthritic knees to the gate, where I arrived to discover that the plane was arriving 15 minutes earlier than scheduled. I made it just in time.

Dustin and I drove to my house, I grabbed a cold beer, slumped into a chair, and asked him to bring me his medication. Five minutes later, he came back and said, “I think we have a problem.”

Dustin has several medical issues besides schizophrenia. He takes about 8 different prescription medications a day. If he doesn’t, he could die. Somehow, while fumbling for his carry-on luggage, the paper bag containing all of his carefully bottled and labeled prescription medications fell out, and was now either in the trash or on its way to Michigan.

Fortunately, the next day I was able to contact his doctors and they called in replacement prescriptions to a local pharmacy. He’s only been here for two days, and I’m exhausted already.

Big Charles and the Fish Fry

2010-06-13T13:58:00.004-05:00

Our hotel was kind of isolated, so if we wanted to go out to eat, we had to take a cab or ride a shuttle bus provided by the hotel into the Port Lucaya district. On one of the rides, the bus driver told us about a weekly event near Freeport called the Fish Fry.

It seems that a Bahamian woman owned three restaurants on a parcel of beachfront land at Smith Point. However, only one of the restaurants - the most successful - is actually on the beach; the other two sit back from the beach. The owner died two months ago and left the three restaurants to her children, who are now fiercely competing with one another for business.

Most of the time, they cater to tour package deals, and are not open to the public. But on Wednesday, all are welcome. At about 6 p.m., people start to arrive, and before long, there are 30 or 40 people waiting in line at the beachfront restaurant. The restaurants are very basic – shacks, really.

Diners eat right on the beach.

The fish are dipped into Bahamian-seasoned batter and fried whole.

I had the Red Snapper.

As people finish eating, they either go to the bar and hang out, or walk down to the water’s edge to hang out. The big crater is where they have a bonfire later in the evening.

When we finished eating, we hung around for a little while. It soon became obvious that after about 9 p.m., it turns into a young people’s scene, when the throbbing music and sweaty bodies on the dance floor took over. So we grabbed a cab back to our hotel, and the cabbie pulled into a gas station to fill up.

After he filled the tank, the driver pointed out a group of men sitting on a bench outside the gas station. “You see that fat guy?” he asked. “That’s Big Charles. He’s a police officer. If there is one person responsible for keeping peace on this island, that’s him. Big Charles don’t play.”

He then proceeded to regale us with stories about Big Charles. He told us that once, when he was about 12 years old, Big Charles came to his school, walked right into the classroom during a lesson, and grabbed a kid by the shirt collar. “Boy,” he bellowed, “You got to stop thievin’!” Apparently the kid had broken into a house, and had been identified by a neighbor. Big Charles dragged the kid out of the classroom, and gave him a terrifying lecture, accompanied by numerous swats to the side of the head. Whether the kid stopped breaking into houses is unknown, but every other child in that classroom got the message: Big Charles don’t play.

“If Big Charles catches some bad guys, he always shoots one,” the cab driver said. He then told us the story of a high school kid named Lamont. Lamont was an athlete in high school - a runner, and represented Grand Bahama Island in numerous competitions. Everybody knew Lamont as a good kid, but he fell in with some bad company. Two of Lamont’s friends robbed a store while Lamont drove getaway. The getaway car broke down, and Big Charles found them. Big Charles cuffed the other two, turned to Lamont and said one word: “Run.” Lamont took off like a rocket, knowing full well what was coming. Big Charles shot him in the leg, and Lamont doesn’t run anymore.

“We don’t have a shooting range on Grand Bahama Island,” the cab driver explained. “So Big Charles practices on criminals.”

The Fish Fry doesn't end until 3 a.m. Uniformed police hang out to make sure there’s no trouble. But all they really need is Big Charles.

Wonderland

2010-06-07T08:34:00.002-05:00

We made arrangements with a tour operator to pick us up at the hotel and take us out to a beach area called Deadman’s Reef. The ride out to the island was entertaining, because we were driven by a garrulous old guy who filled us in on the history of the country, read street signs to us, and stopped to point out a dead duck by the side of the road.

Deadman’s Reef is quite beautiful and unspoiled. It sits about 200 yards offshore, and the rocky coral sticks up out of the water, forming small islands.

The tour operator had set up a small deck with a shady pavilion, an equipment shop, and a snack bar. An 8-inch long local lizard called a “curly tailed lizard” scampered around, looking for handouts.

We swam out in shallow water, across a broad expanse of what is called “turtle grass.”

So naturally, we ran into this guy:

As the water became cooler and deeper, the turtle grass was replaced by sea fans.

On the far side of the coral islands, the water drops off to about 30-40 feet. It was spectacular, festooned with colorful corals and sponges. I don’t have any pictures of the deepwater stuff, but the rocks were covered with what looked like the remnants of a decadent 16th century dinner party at Versailles, complete with candelabras.

When we got into shallower water, we saw corals such as these:

Sea urchins (which are nocturnal) had wedged themselves into every nook and cranny, arranging their spines to discourage visits from Jehova’s Witnesses.

But the real attraction was the huge assortment of fish. Some plain, but most brilliantly colored:

We rested on the shady deck and talked to the tour operator, a guy named Barry. He’s a tall, fit man around 35-40 years old who graduated from the University of North Carolina. In addition to operating the tour, he’s also the reef Warden (in the US, this would be a conflict of interest, but apparently not in the Bahamas). He shows up at this beautiful spot every day, and he’s been doing it for 17 years. He says he’s ready to retire, but retire to where?

You Can't Always Get What You Want

2010-06-06T08:16:00.004-05:00

We took a taxi from the airport in Freeport, and I noticed that because of the history of the Bahamas as a British Crown Colony, traffic drives on the left. But they buy most of their vehicles from the US, so the steering gear is on the left, which is terrifying when you try to pass a truck on a 2-lane road. Strangely, public vehicles such as busses have the steering gear on the right.

We were pleased by the accommodations at our hotel, which is right on the beach. But things do tend to run on “island time,” so you can’t be in a big hurry.

At the check-in desk, they gave us this lock-and-key mechanism, which they told us was for the in-room safe. “Don’t lose that key,” the clerk told me, “Or we’ll have to charge you $100 to replace it.” When our vacation is over, I’m going to quit my job and become a Bahamian locksmith.

After our exhausting travel experience, all I wanted was a cold drink, so we headed over to the bar. To our delight, we arrived at Happy Hour: 2-for-1 on all mixed drinks. I there were four people behind the bar - a girl sitting by the register, a guy running around making drinks, and two other guys lounging around doing nothing. I asked one of them if he was a bartender, and he replied, "No mon, I wish I was." I saw a lot of this in the Bahamas. Lots of workers, but only one actually working.

I ordered Pina Coladas, and we sat by the pool in the late afternoon heat, sipping the frozen coconut slush. Unfortunately, I discovered something disturbing: they hardly put any alcohol in the 2-for-1 mixed drinks.

Disgustingly sober, we checked out the dinner menu at the hotel restaurant, and they told us it was “Pizza and Pasta” night, which we didn’t feel like eating. So we wandered down the beach and discovered this little barbecue shack, called “Chuck’s Pig Roast and Jerk Pit,” which also bore the mysterious words, “Greasy Pole Climbing.”

Chuck greeted us and we ordered conch fritters and barbecued lobster. Chuck shook his head and told us they were all out of conch and lobster. Disappointed, we ordered ribs and chicken. Chuck asked us if we wanted beer, and we perked up. We ate right on the beach, watching Bahamian kids frolic in the water, drinking frosty cold, alcohol-enriched beers.

That night, we were awakened by a furious storm. Lightning struck closely and frequently, accompanied by deafening cracks of thunder. The power went off for a couple of hours, while the rain came down in torrents. The next morning, we asked about it, and people seemed barely aware. “Oh yes, I noticed that it rained,” they would say. Or, “My mother told me there was a storm last night.” I guess if you live on an island in Hurricane Alley, you take such things in stride.

The Usual Suspects

2010-06-05T08:24:00.004-05:00

My wife and I thought it might be a good idea to enjoy a little relaxing getaway before I undergo painful knee surgery in July. So we traded our time-share condo for one in the Bahamas. Unfortunately, airfares to the Bahamas from Orlando are ridiculously high, considering that it’s only 85 miles from the coast of Florida. So my wife, being the frugal woman that she is, suggested we drive down to Fort Lauderdale (a four-hour drive) and fly from there, where the airfare was a lot cheaper.

While packing for the trip, we went through the usual nonsense. I pack for a vacation - my wife packs for an expedition. She sets up her suitcase 3 weeks in advance, and then packs and repacks it a half a dozen times. She’s a SCUBA diver, and she had to pack several pieces of bulky equipment. So strange items started showing up in my suitcase, as my wife ran out of room in hers: A floral-patterned bag; a wad of Maxi-pads; and of course, the groceries.

Our resort accommodations include a full kitchen, so my wife packed canned goods, pasta, a jar of coffee, and incredibly, a jar that she filled with sugar. “It’s for coffee,” she told me.

“It’s a tropical island,” I said. “They have sugar there.”

“Not in the room,” she responded. “We’ll have to go out and buy it.” Remember, she’s frugal.

Normally, when we fly out of Orlando, we suffer through a stressful 45-minute drive to the airport in heavy traffic, worrying whether or not we‘ll make our flight. The long drive to Fort Lauderdale only magnified that stress a hundredfold.

By the time we got to Fort Lauderdale and negotiated the tedious, confusing drive to long-term parking, we were running very late, and we were both nervous and worried. The lines were short at the airport security area, so we felt a glimmer of hope. However, hope doesn’t last very long when the security X-ray machine finds weapons in your luggage.

They stopped my wife, who had stupidly packed her dive knife in her carry-on bag. They offered her the option of mailing it back home (for an amount nearly equal to what she had paid for the knife), or they could simply confiscate it. While she was deciding what to do, a member of the security team suggested that she go back upstairs to the baggage check area and put the knife in her checked luggage. So they escorted her away while I went through X-ray, and the security team discovered the jar of sugar in my carry-on bag.

I had to wait for them to swab my bag and the jar with explosive-detecting wipes. “It’s sugar,” I told them. “Why don’t you just taste it?” The security team looked at each other and laughed. Now you know why I don’t work in airport security.

We made the flight, which was a 19-seat Beechcraft propeller-driven aircraft. The co-pilot actually came back into the cabin and moved a few of the passengers to balance the plane. My wife was quite nervous and uncomfortable. I found this amusing, since she willingly puts on an air tank and swims a hundred feet under the ocean with big, hungry sharks. At least she’ll have a knife to defend herself while I sit on the beach sipping a sweet cup of coffee.

Blame the Mexicans

2010-05-22T20:17:00.002-05:00

Ladies and gentlemen, our American way of life is under attack by the flood of immigrants entering our country both legally and illegally from Mexico. These non-Americans are polluting our precious culture with their tacos and their piñatas. These trifling efforts to destroy America will fail, of course. But there is a more insidious threat. If it is allowed to take root, it will rip out the very soul of the American working man. They’re stealing our beer.

On Mother’s Day weekend – a sacred holiday as American as Christmas or New Year’s Eve, we went out with another family for a combined birthday celebration for their son and our daughter. It was a hot, sultry day, and everyone was ravenous, so we went to Outback Steakhouse (a fine American institution that doesn’t serve tacos).

Because it was Mother’s Day weekend, the place was packed. They told us it would be a 45-minute wait, and herded us into a stuffy little alcove. Before long, we realized the air-conditioning in the restaurant had failed, and so we sweated and tried to make pleasant conversation. The restaurant had set up fans, but they were directed at the diners, not those who were waiting.

Within minutes, I realized there was no way I was going to make it without a cold drink, so I called a waitress over and asked for a tall mug of draft beer. “I’m sorry, sir,” she apologized. “We’re all out of draft beer.”

I sat in stunned silence for about 30 seconds. Out of beer? No air-conditioning? On Saturday night? On the busiest weekend of the year? How was this possible? And they’re charging full price for dinner?

Taking charge of the situation, I ordered everyone out of the restaurant. “There’s a Macaroni Grill just a mile from here,” I told them. So we piled into our cars and drove away.

Macaroni Grill told us it would be a 30-minute wait, and they had air-conditioning, so already we were ahead of the game. I hurried over to the bar and asked if they had draft beer. “Yes, sir,” the bartender told me. “We have Peroni and Amber Bock, but we’re out of Peroni.”

Once again, I was dumbfounded. But I was desperate, so I ordered an Amber Bock. She poured it for me, and while I was signing the credit card receipt, another patron ordered an Amber Bock. She went over to the tap, pulled it forward, and FWISSSSHHHhhh!! No more Amber Bock. I was forced to drink bottled beer for the rest of the evening.

Eventually, we were seated and had a very pleasant meal, except for an incident involving one of my wife’s friends. The waitress handed her a menu, and after she left, my wife’s friend squinted at it for a bit and then and declared, “I can’t read this, the type is too small.” She then looked around the table, expecting someone to read the menu to her. Eventually, someone did, but it wasn’t me. I was biting my lip, trying not to say something like, “Wow! If you had only known that they would give you a menu, you might have brought your glasses with you. I guess they really threw you a curve ball, huh?”

I was very amused later in the evening when I discovered this basket of reading glasses on the hostess station, placed there for the convenience of older people with vision problems and memory problems.

At the end of the meal, one of the waitresses came over with a small cake, announced that she was an opera voice student at a local university, and would sing “Happy Birthday” in Italian. She proceeded to deliver the song in full opera voice, but without the metal breast cups.

Later, I asked our waitress about the beer situation that had plagued us that evening. She told me that all of the restaurants are running out of beer, because Cinco de Mayo (which took place three days previously) had suddenly become extremely popular. The normal beer supplies had been consumed, and there wasn’t enough time to restock before Mother’s Day. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The next time you’re out of beer, blame the Mexicans.

Pickles

2010-05-21T20:46:00.003-05:00

Note:

I got up on a normal Friday morning, showered, shaved, dressed myself for work and stepped out of my front door, only to see this:

That’s a wild turkey, sauntering down the sidewalk in front of my house, like a neighborhood busybody checking up on the neighbors.

There’s a lot of wildlife in Florida, and we see more of it than most people, because we live very close to a state park. There’s a large rookery of snowy egrets nearby, herds of deer wander around nibbling on the shrubbery, and occasionally a black bear will be discovered eating from a garbage can. They’re all mostly harmless. But if you live near water, you often see signs like this:

There aren’t very many swimming holes in Florida, and if you do swim in a lake or river, you don’t swim alone.

The day after the turkey incident, we drove to the middle of the state where my wife’s brother manages a barbecue restaurant. He asked us, “Would you like to meet Pickles?” We had no idea what he was talking about, so we followed him through the kitchen, where he grabbed a loaf of bread and took us out the back door.

There’s a small pond out in back of the restaurant, with crystal-clear water (unusual for Florida). He tossed a few crumbs of bread in the water, which began to boil with fish.

“Here comes Pickles,” he said. A three foot long alligator appeared across the pond and swam casually towards us, halting at the water’s edge.

“She used to come for the fish, but the fish are too hard to catch. So now she wants the bread,” he explained. He squatted down by the water and offered a wad of bread, which Pickles gently took from his hand.

Alligators typically shun humans, hiding in deep water whenever they come nearby. My wife’s brother believes that Pickles was a pet that was released into the pond when she grew too large to keep at home. Even though she seems tame, alligators have very tiny, primitive brains that only process two concepts: food and sex. And while feeding her seems cute, it’s illegal. This is because you don’t want a hungry twelve foot long dinosaur living nearby that has no fear of people.

Personally, I belive this is one of those self-correcting problems. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a picture of my brother-in-law in the paper in about four years, accompanied by an interview with his grieving widow and another photo of Pickles, trussed and immobilized in the back of a Fish and Wildlife van. They’ll haul her off to a state park and dump her into a swamp. One day I’ll step out my door on a typical Friday morning, and there she’ll be. I just hope we have enough bread.

Thick-Headed Inarticulate Experts

2010-04-20T19:14:00.003-05:00

My company’s headquarters are in New Jersey, a state that doesn’t have much of a reputation for sophistication or intellect. However, my company is in a highly technical, very complicated industry, and the good people of New Jersey have risen to the task – sort of.

There’s a certain class of person that I seem to run into over and over again in my day-to-day work; a person that I call the Thick-Headed Inarticulate Expert.

Often, these employees rose through the ranks of the company into management positions. They know their jobs intimately and thoroughly. But you can’t ask them a question about their work, because they don’t understand the question. If you somehow manage to penetrate the concrete encasing their brains, they can’t explain how things work in their department. They can do the work, they just can’t tell you how they do it.

Me:

Expert:

Me:

Expert:

Me:

Expert:

Me:

Expert:

Me:

Expert:

Mike:

Expert:

Mike:

Expert:

Me:

Expert:

Replacing Body Parts

2010-04-09T18:02:00.004-05:00

About a month ago, I noticed that one of my rear molars had become extremely sensitive to cold water. As the days went by, it became more and more sensitive, and biting down on anything remotely solid sent me through the roof. A visit to the dentist confirmed that the tooth was cracked. In addition, a cap on the adjacent molar had worked loose, and decay had set in underneath. I made an appointment to have the loose cap replaced, and a new one installed on the cracked molar.

My dentist has a TV on an articulated arm that can be moved right in front of the patient as a distraction. The dental assistant handed me a remote control and told me to find something I’d enjoy. So I scanned the channels and stopped on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Then, she reclined me in the chair in such a way that I could no longer see the TV, and she and the dentist worked on me for two and a half hours. During that time, I could see them turning away from my gaping mouth to watch and chuckle at the slapstick misadventures, while I could only listen to the cartoon sound effects used to mask the crunch of breaking bones.

One interesting technological development was the ability of the dentist to make his own caps. The dentist took a silicone impression of my tooth and then scanned the tooth with an optical measuring device. Then, he fed the measurements into a computer, and a small milling machine ground and polished a perfect, shiny replica of the tooth from a small block of porcelain in a matter of minutes.

Two weeks later, I went out to do some yard work. Yard work in Florida can be brutal, and I often have to stop due to one of the following: exhaustion, heat, biting insects, or uncontrollable bleeding caused by thorns or incompetent use of power tools. But that day, I had to stop for a different reason.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have old, arthritic knees. They started out as a minor annoyance in my mid-fifties, but now they control my every waking movement. On that day in the yard, my knees simply hurt too badly for me to continue working. I called my orthopedic doctor and scheduled an MRI.

On Monday, I was inserted into the MRI magnetic doughnut, and spent about an hour of my life assaulted by the loud pops, hums and air-horn noises of the device.

Today, my doctor gave me his analysis of the situation, and it’s not good news, but it’s not horrible news either.

The knee is composed of the upper thigh bone the two lower leg bones, which meet at the knee joint. They're protected by the kneecap, and are separated by two cartilage pads - one on the inside of the knee, and one on the outside. These pads wear out eventually, but some people lose them earlier than others. I’m one of them.

Both of my knees have deteriorated to the point where I need surgery. However, I don’t need what’s called Total Knee Replacement, because only the inner pads have deteriorated to the point where I have bone-on-bone contact. The outer pads are fine.

What I need is a Partial Knee Replacement. It’s still serious surgery, but the recovery period is much shorter. Instead of spending two months gobbling pain medication and another four months of physical therapy, I’m looking at only two weeks of suffering and four more weeks of therapy. I’ve discussed it with my boss, and it’s looking like we’ll schedule it for July.

I just hope they don’t have a TV in the operating room.

Flaming Gay Christmas

2010-03-20T21:57:00.004-05:00

By the end of my third day in St. Louis, I was pretty burnt out. I dropped off my dad, drove back to my sister’s house, and started hitting the Captain Morgan. I had achieved a mood just hovering on “jovial” by the time my brother-in-law came home from work, so he and I went out to dinner.

My brother-in-law and I don’t see eye-to-eye when it comes to politics, but the guy has a big streak of crazy, and we sometimes find common ground there. Pretty soon, our blood alcohol levels were in complete agreement, so we drove home and stole some Christmas trees.

Two gay men live down the street from his house, and one of them is a very successful decorator. He makes a point of decorating their home for various holidays, and it can get pretty spectacular. For Christmas, he put a large Christmas tree in his front yard and surrounded it with SIXTY three-foot trees, each one decorated in strands of twinkling lights. The guy had to modify his electrical system to achieve this.

He left the trees up for a couple of months, then took them down and piled them in his back yard to bundle for pickup. My brother-in-law has a small fire pit in his back yard, and it was a chilly night. Nothing burns like a dry Christmas tree, so we snuck over to their house like cat burglars. We gathered up armloads of trees, snickering and tripping over stuff in the dark. I could see the neighbors going about their business in the windows. It’s a miracle they didn’t catch us.

My brother-in-law started a fire in the fire pit, and once it was burning nicely he jammed a Christmas tree into the middle.

The tree smoked and crackled for about 10 seconds, and then an intensely hot roar of flame shot up into the sky, sending a twinkling stream of burning needles over the roof. Thankfully, it had rained for the two previous days, so we didn’t burn down anyone’s house.

We burned over 30 trees like this. Here’s a video so you can see what I’m talking about.

Coffee and Cigarettes

2010-03-19T20:23:00.004-05:00

When my brother Patrick died, it caused a minor family crisis, because Patrick was the primary caregiver for another one of our brothers, who I will call “Dustin.” Dustin suffers from mild schizophrenia, complicated by a genetic disease that affects his blood chemistry.

Doctors have prescribed a daily cocktail of pharmaceuticals that control his symptoms, but if he’s not monitored every month or so, his blood chemistry can get out of balance, and his schizophrenia gets turned up to 11. He becomes disoriented, paranoid and incoherent, and the family worries that he’ll be arrested because his symptoms resemble those of serious drug users.

When his blood chemistry is properly maintained, he’s sweet-tempered, funny and personable. He’s intelligent, but has very little formal education. When he was a kid, he liked to take electronic things apart, but he wasn’t very motivated to put them back together once he found out how they worked.

Dustin has very few life skills. He won’t bathe unless told to do so. He doesn’t know how to cook. His caseworker takes him to the doctor, helps him do his taxes, and buys his cigarettes. My brother Patrick used to reimburse her for that, but now I do.

Once Patrick died, the family members agreed that it was time for Dustin to live in a group home. So Dustin’s caseworker found him a fairly nice one, and he moved in. I fretted about it for months. But when I visited him in St. Louis, I stopped worrying, because he’s thriving.

They serve him three good meals a day, his medications are doled out on a carefully monitored schedule, and he’s only allowed one cigarette an hour until bedtime. This last item is important, because like many people in his condition, he’d smoke a carton a day if he could. He’s not allowed to carry a lighter; the nurse hands him one to light his hourly cigarette, and then he must give it right back.

There are about 70 residents in Dustin’s group home. He told me that they give him one cup of coffee at every meal, but then he added, “I think it’s decaf.” No big surprise there, Dustin. You live in a house full of crazy people.

Dustin asked me to buy him a jar of instant coffee, and he smuggled it in to his friend Vern. When he pulled it out of his pocket, Vern looked around nervously and said, “Put that away! We need it for Saturday night!” Both Vern and Dustin missed breakfast on Sunday, because they were up all night buzzing on a caffeine high.

I bought Dustin a small netbook computer, and he loves it, but of course, he’s falling for every stupid internet scam imaginable. So his e-mail box is full of spam, and he’s rapidly acquiring every spyware virus known to man. The good news is, he doesn’t have any money to give the Nigerians.

Mostly, he uses it to download what he calls “rage metal” music that he listens to when he can score a jar of instant coffee.

Never in Mexican

2010-03-18T18:22:00.004-05:00

My trip to St. Louis started out badly, thanks to miserable weather up and down the east coast.

However, I knew that it was going to get far worse, because I had agreed to meet my youngest brother, who I will call “Iggy.” Iggy is 46 years old, and suffers from bipolar disorder, which means that when he’s in his manic phase, he doesn’t believe he has bipolar disorder. So he stops taking his medication, in the mistaken belief that he’s “cured.”

He gets a tiny disability payment from the government, so he doesn’t feel the need to work. He doesn’t own a vehicle, because he’s never had a driver’s license.

Iggy’s behavior problems have alienated him from most of the family, so I haven’t seen him in at least ten years, probably longer.

I agreed to meet Iggy at the St. Louis side of the Mississippi River. He lives in Illinois, and his disability status enables him to ride public transportation in Illinois for free. But he can’t take the train across the Mississippi River into St. Louis without paying, so he never does.

He walked across the Eads Bridge, and we went to lunch with my dad.

People with Tourette’s syndrome are able to suppress the urge to spout obscenities for brief periods, but the pressure builds and builds, until they have to scream. Iggy is like that. We had a pleasant conversation about our family for about fifteen minutes, and then the crazy started to leak out.

Iggy has been a body builder since his teens. He told me that he spends most of his disability check on dietary supplements, and can’t afford to buy minutes for his phone, or other simple products or conveniences.

Then he told me that he wants to buy a long telephoto lens and a high-resolution digital camera, so that he can take pictures of UFOs. Iggy says that he has seen many UFOs over his lifetime, and claims to have been “indirectly threatened” by the United States military to keep him from telling the media what he knows. He has a UFO tattooed on his arm.

Against my better judgement, I agreed to drive him all the way home, instead of simply dropping him at the train station. He became more animated and intense with every passing mile, insisting that I come up to his apartment to watch him fly a Harrier jet in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. “It’s totally realistic!” he exclaimed.

Iggy shares his apartment with two cats, piles of trash and dirty clothes. He fumbled with his video game setup, and then, in the space of about 5 minutes, crashed a car, stole another, killed two policemen, stole an aircraft, crashed the aircraft, killed two more policemen, and was then shot to death by another. His eyes glittered with excitement.

Before he could start the game again, I told him I had to leave. I knew what was coming. He begged me for money to buy minutes for his phone. Iggy has never spoken to me in his entire adult life without asking for money. Members of the family know better than to give him any, because once you break that seal, he never stops. Reluctantly, I gave him a few bucks and got the hell out of there.

Once I got back to my sister’s house, I got a text message from him, thanking me, and telling me not to give his address to my sister (they have a particularly acrimonious relationship). “Why not?” I texted back.

“She’s not aloud because it’s my wish,” he responded with his typical bad spelling, and then added “Nota.”

So naturally, I texted back and asked what “Nota” meant. His response?

“Nota means never in mexican.”

During that seemingly endless drive back to his apartment, Iggy told me that he’s writing a book, and wants me to help him with the grammar. I doubt that I’ll ever see a single page of it, but if he somehow does manage to write it, I suspect I’ll need adult diapers to read it.

The Fistula

2010-03-17T21:19:00.002-05:00

My dad has been through a lot lately. He’s 86 years old and lives alone because he’s not ready to give up his independence just yet. But nature sometimes intervenes.

In November, he fell and broke his hip. This is the classic injury for older people that usually marks the inevitable transition from independent living to hospital, blood clot, stroke, and death, often in the space of just a few weeks or months.

The doctors told us that there are different kinds of hip fractures, and his was the least severe of them all. They put in a plate, a rod, some screws, and in no time he was back on his feet, hobbling around with the aid of a cane. My brother-in-law offered to get him one of those canes with the four feet on the end, but my dad scolded him, declaring “Those are for old people!”

And then, about three weeks ago, he collapsed in church and was rushed to the hospital. There, they discovered that he had an infected gall bladder. The gall bladder is a small organ about the size of a pear that dispenses bile (a digestive enzyme) through the bile duct to the stomach. Some people develop gallstones, which are similar to kidney stones. Usually, they’re harmless. But sometimes, a small gallstone will migrate into the bile duct and become lodged there, blocking the delivery of bile.

In the old days, the gall bladder would become infected, rupture, and you would die.

But the gall bladder isn’t necessary to survival. So modern surgical techniques enabled surgeons to remove the gall bladder and treat the infection with antibiotics. People who used to die now lived to a ripe old age. But if you’re already a ripe old age, like my father, surgeons aren’t very keen on performing such surgery, because the mortality rate jumps dramatically after 70.

So they have a new method, involving an endoscope. That’s a long tube with a little camera and a few tiny tools on the end that can be inserted down the throat. The doctors had some things they wanted to try, but first they wanted to get a look at the situation. When they got that camera down into my dad’s innards, they discovered something incredible.

The gall bladder rests against the small intestine. His body, somehow sensing the blockage of the bile duct, had spontaneously formed a passageway (called a “fistula”) between the gall bladder and the small intestine, enabling the collected bile to drain. Apparently, it’s an event so rare and mysterious that the entire medical staff was buzzing about it.

The doctors treated the infection with antibiotics, but my father wasn’t out of the woods. The formation of the fistula was new, raw and exposed to digestive acids. He was in severe pain, requiring large doses of morphine, which barely helped. After a few days, he was released from the hospital, and returned home. He stopped eating, because everything had to pass by the fistula, sending him into spasms of horrible abdominal pain. My sister thought he was fading fast, so I flew to St. Louis, expecting to stand watch at his bedside in his final hours.

By the time I got there, two weeks had passed since his release from the hospital. He looked healthy, cheerful and anxious to get out of the house. His appetite had returned with a vengeance, and when I took him out to lunch, he ate a roast beef sandwich half the size of his head and washed it down with a pint of Guinness. I don't want him to die, but it seems like he's running out of stuff that will kill him.

It's Not Easy Being Green

2010-03-02T19:57:00.002-05:00

Like a lot of American companies, my company makes a big show of “going green.” Employees are encouraged to recycle, and the company has changed from styrofoam coffee cups to paper cups with those next-to-useless fold-out handles. I hadn’t seen one of these in thirty years, but now I see them every day.

But like any other corporate initiative, some important executive paints the broad strokes with a big fat brush, and middle managers are expected to fill in the important details. But middle managers are notoriously ineffective at managing anything.

There are several reasons for this. First, if you’re good at your job, and you get promoted, there’s absolutely no guarantee that you’ll be good at managing others who do the job you used to do. Chances are, you’ll suck.

Second, if you’re very, very good at what you do, you’ll never get promoted, because your boss will want you to keep doing it. So someone less skilled than you will be promoted. Typically, this is someone who resents you for being better at your job than they are. Once they reach middle management, they take pleasure in punishing those who are skilled or dedicated.

Third, bosses want middle managers to be effective, so they promote the person they like the best, in the wrongheaded assumption that the employees will also like that person the best. Nobody likes a kiss-ass.

Most middle managers live in a kind of quiet desperation, anxious to please, but equally anxious to avoid a screw-up. Once, a middle manager told me in all seriousness, “If you’re not sure what to do, the best course of action is to do nothing.”

But every once in awhile, middle management unsheathes the mighty sword of e-mail, only to reveal what imbeciles they really are. Last week, I was required to attend a video training program being hosted via video conference at our corporate headquarters. The person managing this presentation sent out the following e-mail:

In our efforts to stay green, we are forwarding the presentation to you for your reference. Please feel free to make a copy and bring it with you to class.

Over 200 people attended this presentation at various facilities. The presentation was 68 pages long, and every attendee showed up with a photocopy, apparently believing they were complying with the “efforts to stay green.” I was the only attendee in my facility who arrived empty-handed. The presenters sat at a table, with the presentation projected on the screen behind them.

They each had a printout of the presentation in front of them, and for two and a half hours, I sat in fidgety misery, while they took turns paging through their copies and reading each page to the 200 attendees, who dutifully paged through their copies in mute, robotic obedience. When it ended, I just wanted to get out of the office and take a long walk in the woods, but I don’t think there are any left.

TV on Acid

2010-02-20T08:44:00.002-05:00

I vividly remember a lurid magazine cover from the early fifties, declaring that we’d all have flying cars by the mid-sixties. I used to feel cheated that this exciting consumer technology never materialized, but these days I’m thankful that nobody has a flying car. The reason I’m thankful has nothing to do with terrorism or infrastructure. I’m concerned about economics. Let me explain.

Another futuristic prediction of the fifties was video conferencing. This concept enabled people all over the world to actually see one another in real time, at a moment’s notice, without the burdensome hassles of traveling to some common meeting place in a flying car.

My new company makes extensive use of video conferencing to conduct meetings and presentations with personnel in far-flung locations. In fact, when I was interviewing for this position, one of the managers in New Jersey interviewed me this way.

Each of our offices has at least one conference room with a large television screen on one wall and a camera mounted above it. The camera system includes a wireless controller box that enables an operator to pan, zoom and focus, manage the audio feed and switch between the camera view and a presentation on a computer. It all seems so incredibly cool and irresistible, but there are two depressing problems.

The first problem (and in hindsight, the most obvious problem) is that almost all high-ranking corporate executives think they are compelling television personalities. So the technology isn’t used in any meaningful way. Instead, most of the time, some guy in a suit stands behind a podium and reads bullet points from a PowerPoint presentation.

The second problem only exacerbates the first. Economics decrees that technology doesn’t have to be good, it only has to be good enough. So despite all of the nifty hardware, the video quality sucks. It all starts out OK, although rather blurry, jerky and flat. Despite sitting through hours of these presentations, I’m not convinced that I would recognize any of the presenters on the street.

But then, weird imaging errors and artifacts begin to creep in, and the video begins to deteriorate.

I’m not going to talk about my college years, but before long, the video feed takes on a hallucinogenic quality. The images no longer represent human beings, but terrifying blood demons from another dimension.

Strangely, the audio is always perfect, providing a soothing, reliable, mantra-like drone that keeps viewers from bolting out of their chairs.

Economics proved that best-selling car in history was also the cheapest: The original Volkswagen Beetle. If flying cars ever became a reality, they’d be small, uncomfortable and dangerous. But they’d probably have really good audio systems.

Dental Anguish

2010-02-05T19:08:00.004-05:00

When I first moved to Florida, I had a dentist who was a consummate professional with two flaws: He had an irritable personality, and he wanted all of his patients to have perfect, unnaturally white teeth. He expected that his patients would gladly spend any amount of money to achieve this goal. It became tedious denying his grandiose plans for expensive crowns, braces and veneers, and then suffering through his demeaning lectures, so I eventually moved on to another dentist.

My next dentist was an ex-Air Force dentist, with a phony, annoyingly cheerful disposition. Once she got my mouth stuffed with instruments, she would tell me long, dull stories about her horses and her kids, in that order. If the procedure was brief, but the story was long, I’d have to sit there drooling on myself until she finished. When she leaned me back in the chair, I discovered that she had pictures of her horses taped on the ceiling, so that I could enjoy them and envy her.

I recently got fed up with the stupid horse stories and decided to find yet another dentist. Using the Web site of my insurance company, I found a few in my area, and examined the information provided. Some of them have degrees from universities in Pakistan or Costa Rica, so I crossed them off the list (not because they’re foreign, but because I don’t know which universities in those places are considered excellent schools).

Also, some of them are shown as bilingual, which always makes me suspicious that maybe they don’t speak English as well as I’d like.

Doctor Swaraminibintu: “Meester? You want Novocaine thees time? Or you want aspirin?”

Me: “No, Novocaine please.”

Doctor Swaraminibintu: “No Novocaine? OK but thees gonna hurt.”

Me: “NO! I want Novocaine!”

Doctor Swaraminibintu: “You say no Novocaine.”

Me: “I know I said no. No aspirin, not no Novocaine.”

Doctor Swaraminibintu: (long pause) “OK, but thees gonna hurt.”

Some of them have offices in inconvenient locations. Eventually, I settled on a conveniently located, English-speaking dentist with a degree from a good university.

On my first visit, the hygienist seated me in the dental chair, and made polite conversation while checking out my teeth. She seemed pleasant enough, but she had a kind of creepy, nervous laugh.

Eventually, it was time to clean my teeth, so she leaned me back in the chair, stuck in that suction gizmo, and started to work on my molars with that rotating rubber scrubber. As I lay there, helpless and gagging on the raspberry-flavored gritty polish, she said, “You know, I was reading Proverbs 31 this weekend? The part about the wife who must get up while it is still dark? And I thought that describes my life perfectly.”

Really? Bible lessons now? Is it possible to find a dentist (or a hygienist) who doesn’t take advantage of the captive patient in some manner? Shouldn’t that be listed on the Web site? “University of Kentucky. Fervent Christian. Owns horses. Irritable perfectionist.”

Expenses

2010-01-30T09:24:00.003-05:00

It’s a good thing my job pays as well as it does, because I’ve noticed that my expenses have gone up. For one thing, I’m doing a lot of dry cleaning, because the dress code standards are higher than any place I’ve ever worked. I could actually wash the clothes myself, but at this point in my life, I can’t see spending all that time ironing.

Another unexpected expense is coffee. My company is a bank with trillions of dollars worth of assets under management, but they buy the world’s crappiest coffee for their employees. It comes in pre-measured packets, one packet to brew one pot of coffee. But the coffee is so horrible, the employees have developed an unspoken agreement to use two packets per pot, in a misguided effort to boost the flavor and caffeine content to acceptable levels. The result is a thick, sludge-like concoction that concentrates all the worst aspects of the flavor, without providing any measurable benefits.

Whenever possible, I stop at a convenience store on the way to work and buy my coffee there. Lots of employees do the same thing. I was asking one guy about it, and he confided to me that he had been thinking of opening a Dunkin Donuts franchise near the office. “I’d make a fortune,” he whispered. A Dunkin Donuts franchise license costs $40,000 to $80,000, and that’s if you qualify. To qualify, you need about $1.5 million dollars in liquid assets - about half will be used to purchase equipment and services, and the remainder is to ensure that you can run the business for awhile before sales take off. My company pays well, but not that well.

Finally, my lunch expenses have gone up a bit, mostly because the nearby restaurants are more upscale than those at my last job. I often bring my lunch to work, but on those days when I don’t, I find that it costs me $8 - $10 for lunch instead of $5 - $7. This doesn’t mean there are no deals available. Yesterday, I went out to lunch at a nearby Applebee's with a group of guys from the office.

Applebee’s offers a peculiar lunch deal. If you sit in the bar area, appetizers are half price. For those of you unfamiliar with Applebee’s, the appetizers are huge, the size of a full meal. I think the idea is that a group of diners will order one appetizer, and everyone in the group will share while they wait for their meal order. Our strategy was that each of us would order appetizers as our meal items. The logical part of my brain said, “Lunch will cost half as much.” So I ordered an appetizer, and sure enough, my lunch bill was $4.50.

But my lunch companions used a different logic. Their brains said, “Since appetizers are half price, I can order two.” The table was barely able to hold the platters, groaning under the weight of all the food. When we left, they complained about how full and sleepy they were, and how hard it was going to be for them to stay awake for the rest of the day. No one even considered having a cup of coffee.

The Week in Pictures

2010-01-13T22:25:00.002-05:00

Not much worth writing about has happened in the past few weeks, so I’ll share some pictures with you. I like to snap pictures of random things that interest me, and there’s usually a story to accompany each one.

In Florida we’ve been suffering, like the rest of the country, through a brutal cold snap. It’s not as brutal as Chicago or Detroit, but for Florida, it’s been really cold. Home heating systems aren’t adequate to deal with it, and most Floridians don’t have proper clothing to cope. But it seems that the people of Florida aren’t the only residents who are suffering. The other day, I was dropping off some dry cleaning, and found the attendant with a bird on her shoulder.

It seems the bird, flying around in search of some warm place to roost, had flown directly into the glass window of the cleaners and fallen, stunned, to the sidewalk. The attendant picked it up, took it inside, and set it on her shoulder. The bird was content to sit there fluffed up, nestled cozily in her hair. In cartoons, people always see tweeting birds when they get hit on the head. I wonder if birds see dancing humans?

My company is very security conscious. Any corporate documents must be disposed of in locked bins. The bins are picked up by a contractor and taken away to shred the contents. The contractor leaves fresh, empty bins behind. Last week, the contractor left these two bins.

Note the absence of a deposit slot on the bin on the right. I find myself wondering if a contractor with this kind of quality-control problem is the best one to handle sensitive corporate documents.

Yesterday a bird shat on my car. It’s an old car, so I wasn’t upset about it. In fact, I’ve been thinking about buying a new car, but I can’t really afford the one I want. But when I saw the stain, I saw Jesus, suspended on the cross, surrounded by a halo of light.

Suddenly, I find myself wondering if the bird shit has miraculously increased the value of my vehicle. Maybe I can list it on eBay and a wealthy Christian will be willing to buy it for the price of a brand-new Buick LaCrosse. Hey, it’s worth a shot.

A Nice Place to Visit

2009-12-19T14:49:00.004-05:00

The hotel in New Jersey was incredibly convenient. The subway stop was right outside the door, and it's a short ride east to the World Trade Center station in Manhattan, and a short ride west to my company’s offices. Thank God I didn’t have to walk very far, because the temperature dropped into the teens overnight, and a howling wind made it feel like the North Pole.

My business unit is on the 10th floor, with an excellent view of New York harbor.

The office is surrounded by an incredible variety of small, ethnic restaurants, all within a short walk: Indian, Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Italian, French, Polish, Hispanic, and more. The local newsstand carries lots of foreign-language newspapers.

Thanks to the cold I caught from my wife, I spent the day sniffling and blowing my nose, trying to wash my hands frequently, because I was constantly being introduced to people, and had to shake their hands. The last thing I wanted to do was spread my misery for Christmas.

Because I had a temporary employee badge for the headquarters building, I couldn’t leave the office area to go to the bathroom without arranging for someone to let me back in. Rather than make a pest of myself, I chose to use paper towels from the coffee area instead of tissue. I might as well have used sandpaper. By the end of the day, my nose was raw and inflamed, my eyes were puffy and red, and I must have looked like crap. I went back to the hotel and flopped into bed without supper and slept for 13 hours.

Feeling better the next day, I took another excursion into Manhattan after work. This time, I went to midtown, where the Empire State Building still maintains a stolid, classic presence over the bustling city below.

I hobbled north, passing Macy’s department store. All my life I’ve heard about the effort they put into the store display windows for Christmas, but I’ve never seen it before. The displays are animated, high-tech and dazzling. I was unprepared for how impressive they were and how much they must have cost to design and install.

Eventually, I wound up in Times Square, which will be a seething mob of celebrants less than two weeks from now, fighting off the frigid temperatures with liberal use of alcohol. I’m glad I won’t be here for that. The weather forecast calls for 5 to 10 inches of snow this weekend, and I’m glad I won’t be here for that, either.

Santa Grabs a Cab

2009-12-19T01:47:00.004-05:00

I've been traveling this week, up to New York City. My company flew me to their headquarters in New Jersey, right across the Hudson river from New York, which is where the company that owns my company is located.

As soon as I told my wife I would be leaving, she came down with a bad cold, and I caught it. As I was sniffling and snuffling and getting ready to leave, I lifted my suitcase to put it in the trunk and something went "sproing" in my back. By the time I arrived, I felt pretty miserable.

My company uses a car service to transport vistors from the airport, so I was met by a guy named Rageesh, holding a piece of paper with my name on it.

That was a first for me. Rageesh drove me to my hotel, in a big, cushy Lincoln Town Car. The car was a non-smoking car, which Rageesh had enforced by duct-taping the ashtrays closed.

The hotel was excellent, right on the river with spectacular views of lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately, the Goldman Sachs building obscures my view of the Statue of Liberty.

One of the reasons I haven’t written about the trip until now is because the hotel charges $10 a day for Internet service. Posted on the door of my room is a little sign that reads, “The maximum rate for this room is $873 per day.” I was offended that they felt the need to squeeze out that last little drop of blood, and I refused to pay the $10.

I didn't have to show up in the office until the next morning, so I took the PATH train into Manhattan, which involved a ride on the longest escalator I've ever seen. The thing gave me a case of vertigo.

As the train approaches the World Trade Center site, you can get a glimpse of the vast, complex subterranean work being done for the new building. Above ground, the equally huge metal skeleton of the new building has begun to rise above street level. Work goes on around the clock.

One place I've been curious to see is Amsterdam Billiards. It's an upscale poolhall owned by the comedian David Brenner. It used to be located on the Upper West Side, but the owners of the building forced them to move so they could tear down the building and construct luxury condominiums. Amsterdam Billiards moved to the East Village, and while it's large, well-appointed and comfortable, it now attracts a college student crowd, rather than an Upper West Side after-theater crowd.

Before long, wandering around lower Manhattan, I encountered something you don't see much in Florida: stairs. Between my cold, my sore back and my aching arthritic knees, I wasn't hustling around like the throngs of heavily-caffienated New Yorkers. So I decided to head back to the hotel and get some rest. On my way, I saw Santa Claus, holding his toy bag, standing at the curb flagging a cab. It must have been Rudolph’s night off.

Self-Serving Corporate Weasel

2009-12-12T16:24:00.006-05:00

In 2007, Fiserv, Inc. acquired CheckFree Corporation for more than 4 billion dollars. The founder, chairman and CEO of CheckFree, Pete Kight, became the Vice-Chairman of Fiserv, Inc., and was appointed to the board of directors. He’s been quiet for a couple of years, learning which buttons he can push and finding ways to spend his cut of the 4 billion dollars.

On Tuesday of this week, Fiserv employees (there are 20,000 of them) were surprised to receive the following e-mail message from Mr. Kight:

From: Fiserv Corporate Communications
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 2:34 PM
To: [OMITTED]
Subject: Message from Pete Kight: An Opportunity to Share in Success

My fellow associates:

Through the good fortune of working with associates such as you, I have had the opportunity to acquire a winery, Quivira Vineyards, in the Dry Creek Valley appellation of Sonoma, CA. As many of you know (because you've had to suffer through some of my impassioned discussions on the subject), my time in the vineyards and winery – as we meet the biological challenges, chemistry and artistic challenges in winemaking, and physical nature of the work – is a significant juxtaposition to the daily work I share with you in the world of technology. Because of Quivira's marvelous location in the inland coastal foothills, the all organic-biodynamic vineyards, the opportunity to work with a world-class winemaker, and the surprising success of the resulting wines so far… I feel very fortunate.

For quite a while I've been thinking about a way to share my gratitude with those who have worked beside me and helped me create this marvelous opportunity. After all, it is all that we have developed together in leading financial services technology over the years that made Quivira possible for me. There is always an open invitation to any associate who finds an opportunity to head north out of San Francisco to visit the winery, to have a personal tour, and to experience personal wine tasting. But recognizing I won't be able to thank too many people that way, and in keeping with our technological heritage, the opportunity to extend thanks to all of you recently presented itself when we updated and upgraded the quivirawine.com website. Effective today, any Fiserv associate who wants to purchase any wine from quivirawine.com can enter a special code at checkout, and 20 percent will automatically deduct from the price of the wine. The code is: [OMITTED]

Please note that this isn't a solicitation. The wine will all sell out and I'm not trying to boost sales. The 20 percent represents my margin, and is simply my way of saying "thank you" to everyone who helped me build this company over the past 25+ years. You should feel as if you have a bit of a stake in making Quivira possible, and this is the best way I can think of to share it with you.

Thanks for making it all possible.

Pete Kight
Vice Chairman

I’m always delighted to see examples of corporate executives waving their private parts in public. Mr. Kight, sensing a free marketing opportunity, used the Fiserv corporate mailing list to broadcast an open solicitation to people who depend on him to make their mortgage payments. Fiserv explicitly prohibits workplace solicitation by employees, as described in the following policy statement:

Workplace Solicitation

Fiserv business unit or corporate management may periodically allow selected non-profit organizations to solicit voluntary contributions from, or distribute information materials to, Fiserv associates in the workplace. Any actual or implied pressure to make such a contribution or accept such information materials constitutes harassment under the Code. Workplace solicitation or information distribution not approved by business unit or corporate management is prohibited because it may pose conflicts of interest, create discomfort among solicited associates, and cause distraction from normal business operations.

Mr. Kight is indeed fortunate, because can simply approve his own solicitation, enabling him to flaunt his wealth and engage in personal sales activities with impunity.

His arrogant declaration that it’s not a solicitation merely serves to illuminate the fact that it is. But I'm especially fond of his attempt to "spin" the ugly sales pitch as a gilded thank-you note. It comes off cheap and tasteless, much like I expect the wine to be.

Midnight vs. Midnight

2009-12-08T21:52:00.003-05:00

We have a black cat, named Midnight. He’s sweet and friendly, but not one of those cats that sleeps curled up on your pillow with his anus in your face all night. So while I’m not exactly a cat person, this one comes pretty close to perfect.

Unfortunately, we live in a part of the country that has a lot of predatory wildlife, so we don’t let him out of the house. He can use the cat door to get out onto the screened-in pool deck, but that’s as close to nature as we allow him to go. Nevertheless, sometimes he escapes, and spends a heart-thumping night creeping around in the woods. But he always shows up the next morning, meowing to be let in so he can get some food and some sleep.

One day, I looked out in the yard and saw him slinking along outside the pool screen. I went out to catch him, only to discover that it was a different black cat. Unlike our cat, this one wore a collar. To my amusement, the tag said his name was Midnight, and he belonged to the new neighbors across the street.

My Midnight and the new Midnight don’t get along. The new Midnight wanders casually along the outside perimeter of the pool screen enclosure, while my Midnight stalks him from the inside. They used to growl and spit at each other, but now the new Midnight will drop by once in awhile and piss on a bush to claim it, while my Midnight just lies on the diving board and gives him the finger.

Shortly after I discovered the existence of the new Midnight, I was out in the yard pulling weeds. The new Midnight wandered over and sat next to a ligustrum tree next to our house. When he was sure I noticed him, he scrambled up the trunk into the canopy, climbed out onto a branch and made a short jump onto our roof.

Like many homes in Florida, we have a ranch house. It’s all one floor, but the architect designed it with two fake dormers so that it would appear to have a second floor. The fake dormers cover actual holes in the roof. These have been cut to enable the henpecked homeowner to climb into the attic and hang pretty curtains in the windows of the dormers, heightening the illusion of a second floor.

Under the eaves of the dormers are soffit vents, with plastic covers to keep out the squirrels.

The covers aren’t fastened, they just clip into the vent holes.

While these covers are effective squirrel-prevention devices, they’re no match for a cat. I suddenly noticed that the new Midnight had pulled out all of the easily-reached vent covers and, turning back to make sure I was watching, he jumped up into the dormer and disappeared. Now he had access to the entire attic area of our house, and spent frequent evenings prowling around up there, to the clear dismay of my Midnight, who spent hours staring at the ceiling.

I tried replacing the soffit vent covers, but the new Midnight just pulled them out again. So I hired a guy to replace the plastic vent covers with perforated aluminum, fastened with screws. It cost me a hundred and fifty dollars. I have no idea if the new Midnight was sealed inside or if he was watching from across the street.

And yeah, that stuff on the outside of the dormers is mildew. I have to buy an extension hose for my pressure washer so that I can climb a ladder and risk my life to remove it. While I’m up there spraying, I kind of hope the thirsty, emaciated cat hops up into the dormer window begging me to let him out. I plan to give him the finger.

Redneck Rodeo

2009-11-28T19:21:00.003-05:00

Every year, a local racetrack closes out its racing season with an event called Crash-A-Rama. It’s a series of novelty events designed to appeal to lowbrows like myself, and it’s billed as a “Redneck Rodeo.” It involves lots of races in which the destruction of opposing vehicles is actually the primary objective of every driver, and a key element to winning.

All of my male friends expressed keen interest in joining me for this absurd treat, but it fell on the day after Thanksgiving. Most of those who are married had houses full of family staying for the weekend, so despite pitiful begging, they couldn’t get their wives to let them out for one night. I wound up going alone.

The parking lot for the track is a gigantic empty field, and it was filled almost to capacity when I arrived, seven minutes before the show was about to start. To my dismay, there was a huge line of people waiting to get in. Just then, a man approached the line, pointed and announced, “If you have exact change, we’ve opened another entrance just over there.” Thirty people, including myself, bolted for the second entrance. I was admitted to the track within a minute.

The track has two grandstands, one along the side where I entered, and another on the far side. The stands on my side were packed, but the stands on the far side only had a few people in them. I walked over to the other side, and found a mob of people crushed together in front of a small gate. Track officials were admitting people one by one, and requiring them to pay an extra $5 for seating. Disgusted, I walked back to the other side of the track.

As I approached the center of the grandstand, I noticed an empty space between two people in the front row. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was able to grab one of the best seats in the house, only about 15 feet from the finish line. The only bad thing about it was the safety screen, designed to protect the people in the grandstand from flying auto parts, and believe me, there were going to be lots of flying auto parts. It wasn’t an obstruction for me personally, but it did hinder photography.

This particular track is only a quarter-mile long, with banked turns. It can be configured for lots of different events. The first race was a standard race, but using junkyard-ready cars on a kidney-shaped track arrangement. Adding the tight chicane meant that there would be lots of vehicle contact, and there was. The race was won by the car that avoided the other cars most successfully.

The next two events were called “Roller Derby” races. The race is run by teams of drivers, three cars to a team. The car in front is called the “puck car,” and it’s not running. The driver can only steer and brake. The next car is called the “pusher car.” The driver of that car attempts to push the “puck car” around the track for the specified number of laps. The third car is the “enforcer car.” The job of the “enforcer” is to keep other “enforcers” away from his team’s “puck-pusher” combination, or to disrupt the “puck-pusher” combination of other teams. By “disrupt,” I mean “destroy.” This race is run on an oval track.

As you can just tell from this photo, there was plenty of carnage. Some “pusher cars” wound up pushing mangled wrecks around the track, with what I suppose were mangled drivers in them. Kids, if you want to grow up and be a race car driver, try not to drive the "puck car."

I was impressed by this driver (the "enforcer" of the winning team), who drove a modified hearse with some kind of plow welded to the front, completing the entire race with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

The next race was something called a “Skid Race,” once again on an oval track. In this event, each car was a front-wheel drive vehicle. The rear wheels were mounted on a pair of metal skis, which threw up a giant rooster-tail of sparks. The cars fishtailed all over the track, pinwheeling out of control at the slightest bump or steering error.

After the “Skid Race,” they set the track up for a “Flagpole Race.” In this event, a “pole” (actually just a junk car) was set up in the infield, just at the center of one straightaway. Cars raced around the track, then had to careen around the pole and reenter traffic. “That’s where it gets tricky,” said the announcer, a master of understatement. Cars often had to circle very wide around the pole, because of all the wrecked or disabled vehicles surrounding it.

Just before intermission, an unusual vehicle was brought out onto the track. It’s a jet-powered car called Green Mamba. This car is capable of going 300 miles per hour, but it’s nearly useless on a quarter-mile track. It crept slowly around the oval, and on each straightaway, the driver would enrich the mixture and belch a 30-foot tail of flame to amuse the children.

The announcer promised that at the end of the show, Green Mamba would return, and they would use it as a gigantic blowtorch to “burn a bus.” That sounded quite spectacular, but it’s not why I was there.

Finally, they set up for the event I came to see: The Figure-8 Track School bus Race. Twelve junk school busses drove onto the track, which was set up in a figure-8 configuration.

When the race started, the busses were in a fairly tight group. But after the third lap, they had spread out to the point where almost every bus approaching the intersection had to thread the needle between other busses crossing in front of them. There were moments of gut-wrenching terror. Eventually, the inevitable happened, and two busses collided. The bus that was struck rolled completely over, and officials stopped the race to verify that the driver was alive (he was).

There were lots of personnel on the track, used to remove debris between events. They were safely tucked away behind concrete barricades set up in the infield portions of the figure-8. However, one ambulance and one tow truck were parked outside these safe havens, so that they could render aid quickly, if necessary. Some young people lounged on the back of the tow truck, chatting – they had seen lots of these races. Suddenly, two busses collided in the intersection, and one of them careened out of control directly at the tow truck. The faces on the young people were priceless, as they suddenly realized they were about to become part of the show. Fortunately, the driver of the bus was able to recover and slam on the brakes at the last instant, bringing the bus to a screeching, smoking halt inches from the tow truck.

After that exciting spectacle, the track ran a “Boat and Trailer Race” on an oval track. Each vehicle had to tow a boat on a trailer, and to win, had to finish with at least a partial boat or a partial trailer. So the obvious strategy was to demolish the other boats. One guy showed up with a monster truck pulling a cabin cruiser. He was good at demolition, but too slow to win. Boats on trailers don’t corner well, so there was a lot of wreckage on the track after only a couple of laps, and the vehicles that were left were crashing into the wreckage at high speed. The carnage generated a lot of choking smoke, which seemed to delight the crowd.

The final race of the evening was what’s called a “Camper Trailer Race.” In this race, each vehicle must tow some kind of camper trailer or house trailer. One guy had a house trailer with a Christmas tree set up. When it started to fall apart, it dumped a gas stove onto the track.

By then, I was so jaded from this orgy of destruction, I decided to leave rather than hang around for the bus-burning. It's hard to drive a car after you've been watching this kind of thing. I was mentally daring someone to cut me off. Especially if they were towing a boat.

Too Many Muhammads

2009-11-15T11:55:00.004-05:00

My new job has a “business casual” dress code every day of the week. For the past six weeks, they’ve been doing something they call “Denim Day” on Fridays, but it’s not what you think. We’re allowed to wear jeans if we pay a minimum of five dollars for the privilege, which is then donated to a local charity, such as Meals on Wheels. I flatly refuse to pay money to wear jeans, as though I’m bribing a prison guard to let me keep a parakeet in my cell.

One problem I’m facing is that this company has a higher standard of “business casual” than I’m used to. The shirts are dressy and crisp, the pants are high quality and the shoes are shiny. Over the years, my “business casual” clothing collection has become outdated and shabby, so I needed to do the one thing I despise: I had to shop for clothes.

My first stop was Casual Male, because I’m long-waisted and require my shirts to be cut long. I’ve never shopped there before. Even though I’m 6”1’ and weigh 230 pounds, it seems that I’m a tiny little elf as far as Casual Male is concerned.

I went to Burlington Coat Factory to take advantage of their low prices, but it seems the bulk of their merchandise is designed to make you look “urban” rather than “urbane.” You don't see many people in the banking profession flashing gang signs.

Finally, I went to JCPenney (that’s how they spell it). In the shoe department, I was greeted by an incredibly attentive and polite salesman. When I made my purchase, he gave me the receipt and explained that if I complete an online survey, I can print out a coupon good for 15% off almost anything in the store on my next visit. “Be sure to enter my name,” he told me, and wrote “Muhammad” on the receipt. I promised that I would, and thanked him for his help.

I wandered around for a little while, and picked up a couple of additional items in the men’s department. When I checked out, the clerk printed my receipt and gave me the same information about the survey. “Please enter my name when you finish the survey,” he asked, and wrote his name on the receipt: “Muhammad.”

So how does JCPenney know which Muhammad to reward for their service excellence? One of them was an outstanding employee; the other was just running a cash register. Who designed this stupid system? Was his name “Muhammad?”

Team Building Exercises

2009-11-10T22:20:00.003-05:00

My new company requires all new employees to attend seven full days of Human Resources training as part of their orientation. Some of it will be quite substantive, delving into business unit organization, the business of securities brokerages, and the internal mechanisms of asset management. But a lot of it is Human Resources nonsense, designed to establish the boundaries of tolerable behavior and rules to enforce conformity, hidden behind management buzzwords like “responsibility” and “service.”

Some of it is laughable. For example, we had to watch a Powerpoint presentation that must have been created in the early 80’s and shown to hundreds of employees over the years, but which nonetheless was laden with typos and grammatical errors. And we watched a video on the subject of business dining etiquette, hosted by an older woman who discussed the use of silverware, chewing with your mouth open, paying the bill, etc., all delivered in a condescending tone as though we had all been raised by wolves.

Today we focused on Team Building Exercises, a concept that normally sends a shiver down my spine. These exercises in futility are typically so embarrassing and demeaning that the only thing I learn from them is to avoid teams at all costs.

The “facilitator” divided the nine new employees taking training this week into two teams. Our first assignment was to name our team, define the word “team,” and compile a list of our individual strengths. It was definitely a low point for me. At least the facilitator refrained from gushing over the bullshit we were being forced to shovel.

But then, the day took an odd turn; it got interesting. Each team was given 12 soda straws, 18 inches of masking tape, and a golf ball. We were required to develop a mechanism that would enable us to drop the golf ball from six feet that would prevent it from touching the floor. Only three straws were permitted to touch the floor. We could hold the ball to drop it, but we couldn’t touch the mechanism. It was a challenging problem, and we had only about 10 minutes to solve it. The teams used very different designs.

The other team made a platform, supported by three straws, onto which they attempted to drop the golf ball. It didn’t work of course, because the ball simply bounced off the platform onto the floor. Our solution consisted of wrapping the ball in three triangles made from straws, and then taping the straws to the ball, leaving two small areas of the ball exposed for fingers to touch it. When we dropped the ball, it bounded around for a while and settled onto two of the straws, held off the floor by a fraction of an inch. I was so pleased, I completely lost sight of the fact that I was working for a banking company, and dropping golf balls would probably not be part of my duties.

Finally, we were presented with a bizarre survival problem. We were told that our team’s airplane had crashed in a wilderness area of sub-arctic northern Canada in late October. We were alive and unhurt, but we were wet, and the temperatures were below freezing. We had salvaged fifteen items from the crash, which included a compass, a box of matches, an axe, 50 feet of rope, an inner tube, a bottle of 151 proof rum, a flashlight, and so on.

We were asked to rank the items by importance to our survival. Then, the teams met to come up with a “consensus” ranking of those items. So those who put the compass first on the list had to defend that choice against those who selected matches. We wound up ranking matches first and the axe second. One of the guys on my team, who is not particularly bright, thought that we ranked the axe second on the list because we would use the matches to burn the axe for warmth. We eventually made him understand the value of the axe. I live in Florida, and people here just don’t understand cold at all.

Eventually, the facilitator showed us a video of a member of the Canadian Forest Service Rangers who explained the true survival ranking of each item. A score for each team was calculated, and my team won by a large margin. After the round of congratulatory fist-bumps, I started to wonder why a banking company would want to develop good team-building skills in a disaster scenario where no typical banking resources were available. Perhaps they know something about the future that I don’t know. I confess the words “zombie apocalypse” crossed my mind.

The facilitator told us that when he took the training, he was on a team with two other guys. They decided that the best survival strategy was to try and walk out of the wilderness, but one rule stated that if you wanted to leave the crash site, you could only carry one item each. They decided to carry the matches, the axe and the rum. “You all died,” joked one of the participants, “but at least one of you died drunk.”

“Yes,” he replied, “but not the one who was carrying the rum.”

“What do you mean?” asked the participant. “Who died drunk?”

He smiled knowingly. “The one with the axe.”

Empty Wastebaskets

2009-11-05T22:09:00.003-05:00

My first week at my new job has been something of a radical culture shock. At my last job, I wore jeans and t-shirts, worked on easy projects that I finished ahead of schedule, and spent the rest of my day checking my e-mail and reading blogs. Those days are gone forever. I have entered a realm of ponderous bureaucracy, inflexible rules and strange company culture.

I’m forced to wear “business casual” clothing, which I despise, because I just look sloppy in it. If I have to look sloppy, at least let me wear jeans and t-shirts so it seems intentional.

Security is very tight, sometimes incomprehensibly so. For example, one business unit is sealed off behind electronically locked doors that separate it from another business unit. This isn’t because either business unit could somehow violate the security of the other, it’s because their revenues are accounted for in different ways, and in the banking industry, that’s equivalent to having offices next to a lab housing rabies-infected monkeys.

The wastebasket beneath my desk seems to have no purpose, because I’m not allowed to throw trash in it. Corporate documents must be deposited in locked bins on the other side of the building so that they can be shredded. Cans, bottles and garbage must be hand carried to the lounge area and deposited in garbage cans. So I’m afraid to throw anything in the wastebasket, even Kleenex.

My computer is heavily protected and the content I can view is filtered through a carefully-controlled firewall. I can’t read blogs or personal e-mail. Worse, there’s no software installed on the machine that’s newer than 2003. Bankers are conservative, and they want to make sure all those nifty new productivity features that Microsoft introduced in 2007 aren’t really just evil Chinese spyware designed to destroy our economic system.

In fact, I can’t read any e-mail at all, because this company uses Lotus Notes, and for some unknown reason, it doesn’t work for me. Corporate management, in their wisdom, limited the scope of different IT groups, so that one single disgruntled employee can’t shut them down completely. One employee does one little part of the task to fix my system, and then passes the task along to another IT guy in some other location who does the next part, and so on. If anything fails during this process, it all goes back to square one and we start over.

My boss called me today, and I answered the phone conventionally: “Hello.” She laughed and told me I had answered the phone incorrectly. Apparently, there’s some corporate script I have to follow, that wasn’t explained to me by Human Resources. She promised to e-mail it to me, but my e-mail isn’t working yet. So now I’m afraid to answer the phone, which means the IT guys won’t be able to tell me when my e-mail is working.

Fingerprints

2009-11-01T12:03:00.003-05:00

I’ve had my fingerprints recorded twice in my life: Once when I was 11 years old, and again on Friday.

When I was a kid, my parents enrolled me in the Cub Scouts for awhile, which consisted mostly of hanging out at someone’s house and doing stupid crafts projects. It was really just an extension of the adult babysitting network. When I turned 11, they convinced me to join the Boy Scouts, which was really just an extension of the juvenile justice system.

I’m sure some kids had a wonderful Scouting experience, learning knots and Indian lore and all that crap. But in my case, it was terrifying. Every kid in my Scout troop was a vicious delinquent, and the only reason they stuck with the Scouting program was because it gave them easy access to knives and guns. I called them “hyenas,” but never to their face.

I attended lots of events, such as campouts, Jamborees and exhibitions. Campouts were the worst, because the adults would hang out around a campfire drinking, and the younger kids were left to fend for themselves, out in the dark woods in the company of psychopaths. We would set up our tents and then disappear, huddling in the mosquito-infested woods until the hyenas lost interest.

On one campout, one of the hyenas brought a large package of firecrackers. He and his buddies spent most of the early evening catching frogs in a nearby pod. They caught a hundred or so, which he kept in a bucket. Every few minutes or the rest of the night, he would stuff a firecracker into the mouth of a frog, light the fuse, and let it hop away. Boom.

He was thrown out of the Boy Scouts a year later for dousing another kid’s tent with kerosene and setting it on fire, with the kid inside, sleeping.

At one exhibition, various groups of Boy Scouts were working on merit badges, and had set up booths for public demonstrations. Some were cooking, some were making arrowheads, some were demonstrating Ham Radio sets, and one group was taking fingerprints as part of the Criminology category of merit badges.

They demonstrated the procedure for me, rolling my fingertips on an inked pad, and then carefully pressing them into the corresponding locations on a fingerprint card. When they finished, I asked what they would do with the dozens of fingerprint cards they had collected. “We send them to the FBI,” they told me.

I’ve thought about this many times over the years, wondering if he was joking, or if somewhere in the basement of the FBI building, there’s a fingerprint card with my 11-year old signature on it. The requirements of the merit badge say nothing about sending the fingerprint cards to the FBI, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it were true. I’d like to believe that the FBI has fingerprint cards for all of those future serial killers in my Boy Scout troop.

Fifty years later, as part of the requirements of my new job, I had to be fingerprinted and photographed. It’s a holdover from the days when banks of this type actually handled money instead of electronic representations of money. Security is very tight. The door to the office area is locked from the inside, and a uniformed guard sits outside, verifying that anyone wishing to enter has a proper ID badge. All of this security is necessary because there are Boy Scouts out there somewhere.

The Slums of Heaven

2009-10-27T14:16:00.002-05:00

For generations, people have been searching for the answer to the ultimate spiritual question, “What is the Meaning of Life?” But it’s a stupid question, because it’s loaded, vague and subject to personal interpretation.

First of all, the question presumes that life has meaning. Life may be meaningless; get over it.

Secondly, the answer to the question, if there is one, is different for everyone, because what’s meaningful for one person may not be meaningful to another. Does the answer have anything to do with God? Love? Responsibility? Ethics? Brotherhood? Afterlife? Personal Growth? Victory? Humility? The list goes on and on. Pick one - that’s your category of “meaning.” Your neighbor will pick something different. Even if you manage to work out some sort of “meaning,” people with the same category will come up with different answers.

But the worst part of the ultimate question is that even if you find the answer, it’s useless, because you can’t trust it. How many people will actually accept the answer if it disagrees with their expectations? Most people will engage in “curve fitting,” adjusting the answer until it falls into their belief system. Those who triumphantly claim to have found the answer are lying to you, but worse, they’re lying to themselves.

For these reasons, it occurred to me that people have been asking the wrong question. There’s a much better question. One that isn’t loaded or vague. The answer will differ for everyone, but that’s OK, because it’s a personal question, and everyone already knows the answer.

Call me a cynic, but I think the answer can be found on page one in the playbook of every salesperson who ever walked the earth: “How much are you willing to pay?” Car salesmen who work on commission have been asking this sly question for a century, lulling the customer into a sense of control.

This question can be applied to every situation, every decision, and every moral quandary. It has nothing to do with money, although in the case of moral quandaries, money is often a factor. Payment can be measured in time, energy, consequences, etc.

For example, most people devote one day a week to spiritual maintenance. Is that enough? How many days a week are you willing to attend church services to ensure that your personal relationship with God isn’t leaking oil?

And for those worried about an afterlife, how much are you willing to pay to get an acceptable deal for eternity? If you believe in reincarnation, how much karma are you prepared to deposit to come back as a higher mammal instead of an intestinal parasite?

Some people are incapable of answering these questions for themselves, so they rely on others to give them an answer. That’s why we have a clergy who dictate the price (prayer, music, lectures, community service). But if they work on the same principal as salesmen, they’re getting a commission, which they cash in after death to live in a nicer part of heaven. Do you suppose that heaven has slums? That’s where I’m headed.

The Most Unpopular Guy in the Room

2009-10-13T20:09:00.002-05:00

I haven’t written anything about this particular topic, because I didn’t want the wrong people to see it. But it’s reached the point where I can talk about it.

About a month ago, I got a phone call from an internal recruiter for a very large bank headquartered in New York City. During the five months I was unemployed, I must have fired off two or three hundred resumes, and one of them had finally percolated down through the layers of bureaucracy at this particular institution. The wheels turn very slowly in banks, despite the efforts of bankers to stop them completely.

The recruiter told me that they’ve opened up an office near where I live, intended to house portions of their business that don’t need to be in New York. He described the position they had available, which would be a radical departure from the work I’ve been doing for over 30 years. Since the 1970’s, I’ve been a Technical Writer, producing thousands of pages of user’s manuals for software and electronics products. In other words, I write books that nobody reads.

In this new job, I would be documenting banking policies and procedures, not products. The purpose of this documentation is to satisfy government regulatory agencies, who are under fire from government lawmakers for failing to properly regulate banking activities in the past decade. Ironically, this is the primary reason that millions of people around the world, including me, were out of work in the first place.

The regulatory agencies will review the documents I write to verify that the bank practices are in accordance with federal laws and regulations. In the banking industry, this is known by the term “compliance,” and it’s a deadly serious business. The Compliance department at a bank is equivalent to the Internal Affairs department at police headquarters. As one of the managers who interviewed me said, “You’ll be the most unpopular guy in the room.” No problem, I’m used to that.

I interviewed with a total of four people over several weeks. This particular bank is what’s known as a “custodian bank.” That’s a bank that provides services to other banks. They’re profitable whether the economy is doing well or doing poorly, because they make their money on transactions, whether the money is coming in or going out.

They made me a verbal offer that was $15,000 a year more than I make now. I don't know what came over me, but in the middle of a terrible recession, I turned it down and demanded $20,000. Three days later, which is positively warp speed for a bank, they agreed - but with the condition that I interview with two additional senior managers, who apparently wanted to meet The Man With Brass Balls. Those interviews went well, and they sent me the formal offer.

So today I gave my notice at my current job, which I’ve only held for six months. I was hired as a Technical Writer, but the job is actually something I call “Software Paleontology.” This is where a software product has been around for a long time, undergone dozens of revisions, and nobody has kept track of anything.

There are features in the software that no one knows how to use, because the developer that wrote the code is long gone, and there are no specifications or documentation of any kind. Nobody is using these features, but management can’t spare software engineers to remove them from the product – they’re too busy working on new features for which there are no specifications. I spend most of my day digging for tidbits of information that will enable me to formulate plausible descriptions of product features that nobody uses. It’s unfulfilling, and people cringe when they see me coming. I’m the most unpopular guy in the room.

Betrayed by Aluminum

2009-10-09T12:45:00.003-05:00

In the course of civilization, numerous social conventions have developed for the sake of efficiency, safety or courtesy. One example is the handshake. Another is driving on one side of the road. My favorite is the line (known as a “queue” in some cultures), in which people line up to take their turn receiving a service.

Over time, lines have been abstracted by “take a number” systems, so the line doesn’t have to physically exist. Express lines have been created to speed checkout in the supermarket so the guy who only has a six-pack of beer doesn’t have to wait for Octomom to buy her weekly groceries. But the concept of the line still exists: First come, first served.

Regardless of the form it takes, the most essential component of line formation is trust. Members of the line trust that other members of the line won’t attempt to change position, and that the service provider will respect the order of the line.

However, last night my trust was betrayed. I was waiting in line at Federal Express to pick up a package. The clerk called me forward and took the package claim slip from me. Normally, the clerk would leave to go into the back room, pick up the package and return to have me sign for it. But this time, another clerk happened to be walking by on his way to the back room, and offered to pick up the package. My clerk handed my claim slip to him, turned around, and said, “Can I help the next person in line?”

Some guy with a huge, heavy box that had been poorly taped together came forward and heaved the box on the counter. He was sending it to Africa. He wanted insurance. He hadn’t filled out a shipping label. He didn’t speak English very well. When she asked what was in the box to establish a value, all he would tell her was “Aluminum.”

I couldn’t believe it. I had been bumped from the line! While the clerk was dealing with Big Box Guy, the second clerk returned from the back room and dropped my package on the counter. It sat there for twenty minutes until the clerk finally wrapped up with Big Box Guy. During that time, every other customer in the office completed their business with the other clerk, who disappeared into the back room after the last one left.

I understand that the clerk was attempting to use what would otherwise be considered “down time” to improve service for the other customers. But she accepted a task that ruined the service for me. I’m not a violent man, but I wanted to hit her over the head with a big box of aluminum.

We Don't Need No Stinking Lobsters

2009-09-25T11:45:00.005-05:00

Today is my last day in Lafayette, Louisiana, a comfortable, charming small town full of pleasant, courteous people and fantastic food. If I lived here, I’d weigh 600 pounds.

The city is pretty much the Cajun capital of Louisiana. Many of the people speak with a pronounced French accent. Public buildings are often labeled in French and English, and street signs alternate between English with a small French sub-label and French with a small English sub-label.

Lots of interesting older buildings have been renovated, giving the older sections of the city a hip, funky appeal.

Music is readily available, but it’s usually traditional Cajun or contemporary Zydeco, both of which make heavy use of the accordion. If you don’t like the accordion, it can wear on you.

But the food is the real draw here, especially seafood (which includes freshwater delicacies such as catfish, crawfish and alligator). Unlike Florida, most of the restaurants are unique family establishments. Sure, they have chain restaurants like Olive Garden and fast-food franchises like McDonald’s and Taco Bell, but those are concentrated around the university area. Downtown, it’s a different story.

Cajuns take pride in their seafood dishes. One resident told me that Red Lobster tried to open a restaurant here, which quickly failed. “Who would eat that mess?” he asked.

Cajun food is simple, but delicious and always expertly prepared. Rich Gumbo soups, shrimp and crawfish etouffe, rice stuffing, fried oysters (my favorite), and much more.

Tonight is my last night here. It’s going to be difficult returning to Florida, where unique, interesting restaurants are almost extinct, and people willingly eat at Red Lobster.

Hot Stuff

2009-09-22T22:31:00.003-05:00

I drove down to Avery Island, Louisiana to tour the Tabasco plant. Technically, I suppose it is an island, because it’s surrounded on all sides by water. But it’s just slow-moving black-water bayous surrounding a large natural dome-shaped salt deposit.

Avery Island started as a salt mine, which was destroyed by Union forces during the Civil War. The owners returned after the war and restored production, which they now lease to a salt mining company.

After the Civil War, oil was discovered; it’s often found near natural salt deposits. The oil is still being pumped from the island. But the salt and oil operations are concealed from public view. Everything is carefully managed to preserve its natural beauty, and the island functions as a wildlife sanctuary for thousands of migratory birds.

The island and its production facilities are owned by the McIlhenny family. In 1868, one of the family members invented Tabasco sauce and sold about 600 bottles. Today they produce over 700,000 bottles every day and ship them all over the world.

To enter the island, tourists cross the bayou over this small bridge to the gatehouse.

Because the gatehouse is on the right side, the attendant extends a broom handle through the passenger window. On the end of the broom handle is a spring-loaded clothespin holding a parking permit. You take the permit and clip a dollar onto the clothespin, then drive up to the main factory building.

I took a tour of the factory, which was a little disappointing because production was shut down on Sunday. There are a few dusty exhibits, then a brief film. Afterwards, we walked past a long window looking out onto the factory floor, ending in another dusty exhibit room. But I learned a lot.

Only two percent of the peppers used to make Tabasco sauce are grown on Avery Island. The rest are grown in Central and South America. They’re shipped to Avery Island, where all of the production takes place.

The peppers are crushed into a pulp and then poured into oak barrels. A hole is drilled in the lid, which is then covered with coarse salt mined on the island. The salt enables fermentation gases to escape, but prevents intrusion of bacteria. Fermentation takes three years, then the resulting glop is mixed with vinegar and other ingredients, stirred for about a month, and bottled. They re-use the barrels over and over. Some are a hundred years old.

There’s a gift shop nearby, where you can buy t-shirts, key rings, china, Christmas ornaments and jewelry emblazoned with the Tabasco logo. You can also buy a wide variety of Tabasco sauce products, sold in all sizes from an eighth of an ounce to full gallon bottles. A freezer holds these massive bags of dried pepper pulp, which are used when boiling crawfish Cajun style.

With the salt mine, the oil wells and the Tabasco factory, I think it’s safe to say that the McIlhenney family has money. I’m sure their kids have no trouble finding a date for the prom. I wonder if they carry pepper spray.

Open Containers

2009-09-20T21:44:00.007-05:00

Sandy and I decided to drive to New Orleans on Saturday. But Saturday was also the day of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette vs. Louisiana State University football game, a traditionally bitter contest that draws an enormous throng of football fans from all over the state. In fact, the stadium seats over 92,000 people, which is about 2% of the entire population of Louisiana. So we decided to avoid Baton Rouge, where the game was being played, and took the southern route along the coastal bayou region.

We passed lots of these little “truck stop casinos,” which are only permitted to offer slot machines. Large casinos can offer table games, but we only saw a couple of those.

Another peculiar thing we saw were these little drive-through Daiquiri stands. Yes, you heard me correctly.

In Louisiana, you’re permitted to drive with an alcoholic drink that has a cover, which is considered to be a sealed container. If there’s a straw in the drink, it’s considered to be an open container. So these Daiquiri stands sell you a drink in a plastic cup that has a plastic lid with a straw poking through a hole in the lid. If you get pulled over, all you have to do is remove the straw and you’re legal. If you leave the straw in the drink, you’re busted.

You can also walk almost anywhere with a drink in your hand in Louisiana, as long as it’s not in a glass bottle. It’s technically illegal, but the police don’t enforce it, particularly in New Orleans. If you’re drinking from a bottle in a bar and you want to leave, the bartender will give you a “to go” cup and pour your beer into it.

Another strange thing you see here is the bartenders. The drinking age is 21, but you can tend bar at the age of 18. So lots of bartenders are too young to drink the products they sell.

When we arrived in New Orleans, we didn’t travel through the areas that were devastated by Hurricane Katrina. But you do see some houses that are in rough shape, possibly as the result of neglect. Others are just old.

We took a walk though Jackson Square, chuckling at the fortune tellers and street performers. But it was a brutally hot day, and cold beer started to seem like a good idea. Bourbon Street is only a couple of blocks away. We found a place called Huge Ass Beers with a guy holding a sign out front. I gave him a couple of bucks to let me have this picture taken.

The beers are served in huge, tub-like plastic cups. Here’s the bartender, standing by a tip jar labeled “Huge Ass Tips.” Sandy and I wondered why she didn’t have a huge ass, which would make perfect sense.

I used the bathroom, which I’m sure has been the site of some awful events. The walls were covered with the usual obscene graffiti and crude anatomical drawings, but also bore this testament to the success of the bar.

Just down the street is another bar that hasn’t managed to think big enough.

It occurred to me that there’s a business opportunity for someone to open “Ginormous Ass Beers.”

When we left New Orleans, we drove north across the Lake Ponchartrain bridge, which is 24 miles long. It’s a marvelous feat of brute force engineering.

In our efforts to avoid Baton Rouge, we circled north around the city, eventually arriving in the tiny city of St. Francisville. An automobile ferry crosses the Mississippi River at this point, which costs one dollar. The ferry runs every half hour. Here’s the ferry landing. You can just barely see the ferry approaching from the other side in the twilight.

The ferry is a wide boat with a wheelhouse in the center. Cars drive on from the side of the boat, circle around the wheelhouse, and exit from the other side.

The view of the mighty river during the crossing was breathtaking.

Unfortunately, the oncoming darkness proved to be too much for our navigation skills, and we got lost in the rural back roads of Louisiana for a couple of hours before finally finding our way home. Worse, the University of Louisiana Ragin’ Cajuns lost to LSU. They’ve never beaten LSU. In fact, they haven’t scored a touchdown against LSU since 1924, a streak of bad luck that they were unable to break that night. I’m not a football fan, but it seems as though everyone else in Louisiana is. That means our customers, who live in Lafayette, will be unhappy about the loss on Monday. The good news is that Bernie is doing the training, so they’ll take it out on him.

The Bad Penny

2009-09-20T09:27:00.003-05:00

Due to the limited number of flights available from Lafayette, Louisiana, it was more sensible for me to stay over the weekend between our two-week training program. However, three of our five-person team were scheduled to return home on Friday night. Two of them aren’t coming back for the second week, but Bernie is coming back.

He checked out of the hotel where we were all staying that morning. After our last class, he drove the other two to the airport. I returned to the hotel with visions of frosty mugs of beer dancing in my head. Two days without Bernie. It’s almost hard to imagine. It’s like looking in the mirror before surgery, trying to guess how you’ll look once they remove a big tumor from your face.

I changed to comfortable clothes, finished a couple of tasks on the computer, and relaxed. It was 5:30. Normally, Bernie would be hassling us to go out to dinner, because like many people his age, he goes to bed early, so he has to eat early. Tonight I could eat as late as I wanted. The stress of work and dealing with Bernie slid from my shoulders like a great weight, and then the phone rang. It was Bernie.

The airline had oversold the flight, so they asked the passengers if anyone would give up a seat for a free travel voucher, and Bernie, displaying the reflexes of a mongoose, pounced on the deal. He figured he could use his frequent guest points to stay overnight for free in a hotel near the airport and fly out the next morning. But he no longer had his rental car, so he called me because he needed a ride to the hotel. Plus it was 5:30, so he needed to eat.

Depressed, I drove to the airport. I called Bernie as I approached the terminal to let him know I was pulling up. “Oh, I guess I should have called you,” he said. “I decided to take a cab to the hotel. Can you pick me up for dinner?”

Now I was pretty upset, but Bernie’s hotel was on the way back to my hotel, so it wasn’t out of my way. I stopped out in front of the lobby entrance and he got in the car. It seems that this particular hotel consists of several buildings, and his room was about a hundred yards away. I drove him to his building so that he could drop off his bag.

A few minutes later, he emerged and told me that his room key card didn’t work. Seething with irritation, I drove him back to the lobby. He went inside and came right back out, chuckling to himself. “Can you believe it?” he asked. “I was using the key card from the first hotel!” Idiot.

I’d had enough of Bernie for that day, so I denied his demands that we go out to eat immediately. Instead, we drove downtown where a local music festival was being held. Beer was flowing like water, and I drank deeply. Bernie sat glumly on a bench, trying to look pitiful and hungry.

Meanwhile, I had a long conversation with Sandy (the other employee who is staying for the weekend), in which she revealed that Bernie has some personality qualities that make young women uncomfortable.

After we had deadened our sensitivity to Bernie with alcohol, we decided to take pity on him and get some dinner. We walked to a nearby neighborhood and found the Girls Gone Wild bus parked outside of a club. God only knows what they were doing in there. I had Bernie take this picture. It took him five minutes to figure out how the camera worked.

Sandy asked me to take this picture – I swear it wasn’t my idea.

As soon as we finished, two giggly young women walked up with a camera and asked if I would take their picture in front of the bus. Bernie once again displayed his mongoose reflexes and sprang forward, grabbing the camera out of their hands. We then spent an uncomfortable five minutes watching Bernie fumbling with the camera and trying to make conversation with the girls, who went from giggly amusement to frozen smiles.

Next week is going to suck. Bernie won’t have a rental car, so I’m going to have to drive him anywhere he wants to go.

The Scarlet Avenger and the Unstable Table

2009-09-16T18:05:00.003-05:00

While waiting for the plane to take off in Atlanta, I struck up a conversation with one of the other passengers about our destination city, Lafayette, Louisiana. I asked her if there were any good restuarants in the area. I had forgotten that we were flying on a small, regional jet. This meant that most of the people on the plane were locals, returning from business trips or vacations. Within a few seconds, everybody on the aircraft was shouting out suggestions for places to get etouffe, gumbo, fresh seafood, creole cooking, etc.

So far I have not been disappointed by a single meal. Even the smallest lunch counter establishments have fantastic food. However, eating with Bernie has been an issue, because he has some bizarre habits. At dinner on the first night, Bernie had a baked potato. He opened it up flat like a butterfly, and mushed it up with a fork. Then he proceeded to cover it with an enormous quantity of salt and pepper, and eight patties of butter. We questioned him about his cholesterol and blood pressure, which he proudly claims are in the “normal” range.

At breakfast the next morning, he had a small bowl of Raisin Bran with six packages of sugar.

The guy is pretty old, so I wonder how much longer he can continue eating like this. I’m hoping he makes it the full two weeks. We’re trying to concoct strategies to avoid eating with him, but it’s hard to get away.

The training classes we’ve been presenting thus far have been a mixed bag, some going well, some going very poorly. The training room is very small, with seating for 8 trainees. Sometimes we have 16 people in there. If someone has to leave to go to the bathroom, it’s like a Chinese puzzle. One person moves into an empty space, and three others shift over to open a space somewhere else. Then the person who needs to leave moves into that space, and so on until we work them to the door.

A projector sits on a small, wobbly table, and that’s where we put our laptop that we hook up to the projector. If you have to type anything on the laptop, the whole table shakes and shimmies and the image projected on the screen jitters around. When I’m training, I put the laptop on my lap to prevent this problem, but Bernie is oblivious and just bangs away on the keyboard, giving everyone nausea or migraine headaches.

When I picked up my rental car, I was given this “arrest-me red” Dodge Avenger.

It’s a fairly large, powerful car, but because Lafayette, Louisiana is such a small town, I haven’t had occasion to drive it faster than 35 miles an hour between the hotel and our customer’s offices. I can tell you that it rattles and bounces like a VW microbus when I cross railroad tracks, so I wouldn’t say it was a comfortable car to drive. Maybe this weekend I’ll take it out on the highway and see if I can avoid the State Police. It should be easier than avoiding Bernie.

Day One

2009-09-14T22:11:00.003-05:00

I’m in Lafayette, Louisiana for two weeks, training customers on the use of our software product. Training isn’t my job, I’m just being used in this capacity because my company doesn’t have a training department. So they grab whoever they can to perform the task, qualified or not.

Ordinarily, I would relish a challenge like this, but I’ve been saddled with a co-trainer, and so far, that’s not going very well. We’ll call him Bernie. He’s an older gentleman who likes to stand too close when he talks, greets female co-workers with an unwelcome too-long hug, and believes he knows more on every subject than anyone else on the planet.

My colleagues who know him all too well snorted with amusement when I told them that I would be travelling with him, then switched to horror and pity when I told them it would be for two weeks.

I flew to Atlanta and met him at the airport. We flew from there to Lafayette on a small regional jet with small regional seats. I had the window, Bernie had the aisle. He sprawled across his seat, his elbow digging into my vital organs. He seemed unaware that I was squashed uncomfortably against the curved bulkhead, straining to maintain some kind of personal space.

When we arrived, we checked into the hotel (I’m not rooming with him, thank God), and agreed to meet in the lobby to go out for dinner. He has this annoying habit of asking others for suggestions, then vetoing them in favor of his own preference. He seems to believe that as the senior member of the team (there are five us here), he gets to make all of our decisions, even those involving meals.

The first training session went very well, but it lasted all day and I was exhausted when it was over. We returned to the hotel by 5:15 and I went to my room to decompress. Ten minutes later, Bernie was banging on my door, insisting that we all go out for drinks before dinner.

We discussed possible places to go, finally convincing Bernie to drive with us to a trendy area of town. Unfortunately, it’s Monday night, and most of the trendy bars and clubs don’t even open on Mondays. Those that do don’t open until late on Mondays. Eventually we found a perect, shabby little dive, although Bernie seemed perturbed that he hadn’t made the decision. I was looking around for a waitress, when I saw Bernie leave the bar with a determined look on his face. None of the others knew where he had gone, or why.

Just as we were getting comfortable, Bernie entered the bar and triumphantly announced that he had found a better place, which had comfy sofas for us to sit on instead of the perfectly suitable barstools we had already warmed up. So we reluctanly finished our drinks and followed him out of the dive, half a block up the road, and into a gay bar. That’s right, a gay bar. Here’s Bernie, blissfully ignorant of the photgraphs of naked men over his head:

We spent a couple of hours there, listening to diva music on the jukebox, and howling with laughter at Bernie’s attempts to find the men’s room (there wasn’t one – it’s unisex). Despite the humorous moments, it’s going to be a long two weeks.

Pineapple Apricot Horseradish

2009-08-20T19:09:00.003-05:00

I don’t do the grocery shopping very often; my wife prefers to do it. This is because we do it differently. When I do the shopping, I go to one store, buy everything I need, and then I go home. When my wife does the shopping, she divides the groceries into categories and shops for them on different days and at different stores.

She buys dry goods at a bulk discount club once a month, meat and vegetables at the grocery store a couple of times a week, health and beauty aids at whichever drugstore is offering the best coupons. She waits for some items, such as coffee, to go on a 2-for-1 sale, and then buys several pounds and freezes it. I don’t know about you, but if I’m out of coffee, cost is not the issue.

This is all too much like work for me. Plus, my shopping trips are all pretty much the same. I buy staple foods like meat, bread and cheese, some frozen vegetables and a few paper products and cleaning supplies. That’s it. I’m in and out of there in half an hour.

The problem comes when my wife sends me to the grocery store. This is because I’m no longer shopping, I’m acting as her shopping proxy. I’m given a list of a few items, all familiar. But there’s always one strange, unknown item on the list. Something I’ve never heard of. Something that fits into no known food category. Something that I will be unable to find, and the store clerks will be unable to find, and the store manager will be unable to find. Something that might not even exist.

One time it was yeast. OK, I’ve heard of yeast. I know what it’s used for. But I don’t know how it’s packaged, or where it’s kept. And the high school kids who work at the grocery store have never heard of it, except that they know it’s a kind of infection.

Another time it was clam juice. I can’t remember what she wanted it for. Sometimes I suspect she doesn’t want it, she just wants to sit at home snickering at my frustration trying to find it. Before long, I had three store employees scouring the aisles for it. I was dumbfounded when, forty minutes later, the store manager found the clam juice in the section where they keep canned tuna.

This week, she sent me to the store for hamburger buns and hot sauce. I trotted out of the house, confident and relaxed. Halfway to the store, my cell phone rang.

“I need some Pineapple Apricot Horseradish,” she said, and I felt the air being sucked out of my lungs.

“There is no such thing,” I snarled. “You’re making it up.”

“No, really,” she insisted. “I’ve seen it there.”

I picked up the hamburger buns, and then asked the store manager for horseradish. He sent me to the Deli case. There were four or five different types of horseradish, but not what my wife wanted. Just by chance, I had to pass the Fish counter, and to my shock, I found another display of horseradish. Not the same horseradish from the Deli counter, this was a whole other array of products, but still not even close to my wife’s fantasy horseradish.

Throwing up my hands in defeat, I headed for the Condiments aisle, knowing I’d find the hot sauce easily. Incredibly, I found yet another display of horseradish, none of which matched the products from the Deli case or the Fish counter. And no, there was no Pineapple Apricot Horseradish.

Why does the supermarket keep the same product in three locations? How are people supposed to find what they want? The thing that bothers me the most about this is the distinct possibility that there’s yet another horseradish display somewhere else in the store, and the elusive Pineapple Apricot Horseradish is there. Maybe it’s in the Ice Cream freezer case, or tucked in next to the School Supplies.

The worst part of this entire experience is the certain knowledge that my wife will go to the supermarket next week and find it right away.

Pinkeye

2009-08-19T17:53:00.002-05:00

On Friday night, I went to a Scottish pub with a group of coworkers. We sat for a couple of hours, noshing on appetizers and drinking beer. One of the items on the menu was a peculiar delicacy I’ve never seen before, called a “Scotch Egg.” It’s a peeled hard-boiled egg that is surrounded by ground sausage meat into a ball about 4 inches in diameter and then deep fried. It’s served by slicing it into wedges, like a melon.

I don’t know whether it was the Scotch Egg or the thick, bitter beer, but after about an hour, I started picking at my eye, which was producing unusual quantities of what I used to call “eye snot.”

By 11:00 that evening, my eyelid was swollen and inflamed, and my eye was practically drooling mucus. The next morning, it was glued shut. I was able to pry it open in the shower, but I didn’t like what I saw.

I knew right away it was conjunctivitis, also known as “pinkeye.” It’s a fairly common and highly contagious disease, usually infecting little kids who bring it home from day care. I’ve never had it in my life. So why am I getting it now?

After a visit to the doctor, I was given a prescription for antibiotic eye drops, which I have to put in my eye every 3 hours, when I’m awake. As it turns out I wasn’t awake very much on Saturday and Sunday, because the infections sucked the life out of me.

Apparently, it’s going to look like this for 2 weeks. The good news is that I can drink all the beer I want, because nobody will be able to tell by looking at my eyes.

Proof Proof

2009-08-13T19:46:00.002-05:00

In the course of my many years embedded within corporate environments, I have had the opportunity to see a lot of clueless morons posing as professionals. Some professions are fairly immune to such problems, such as Engineering. Engineers all know within a few days who among them is pretending to be an engineer, because that person simply can’t do the work.

Other professions are more tolerant of this problem, because it takes a long time for the fakery to reveal itself to those who can do something about it. For example, middle management is an area where an idiot can survive for years, because all they have to do is contain costs. Run the department poorly but cheaply, and senior management will leave you alone. Eventually, the ineffective managers will be found out through employee attrition or customer complaints, and they’ll be promoted to get rid of them.

But as I’ve stated before, Marketing is where the phonies work. This is because you don’t have to actually prove that a course of action is the best course of action, you just have to claim that it is. You may need a pie chart or two to convince your senior management team, but that’s what interns are for. There may be good, professional people in Marketing, but there’s no way to know who they are. Marketing is to bullshit artists what the Catholic priesthood is to a pedophile.

I call this situation “proof proof.” In other words, the actions or policies of the individual can’t be proven false, invalid or inferior. Over time, they may be proven ineffective, but by that time, they will have been replaced by other “proof proof” actions or policies.

Lately, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that another corporate department is being taken over by phonies, but it’s different kind of phony. A much scarier phony. The department is Human Resources, and it’s being taken over by Evangelical Phonies. They don’t want senior management to believe what they say, they want everybody to believe it.

The problem is that Human Resources has always been treated as the retarded stepchild by senior management. Human Resources doesn’t make money, they’re a cost center. Management needs Human Resources to handle things like sexual harassment complaints and employee benefits, but they don’t have to like it. And there's no way they're going to invite them to the offsite management meetings in Maui.

So they give them a budget and tell them not to call unless it’s an emergency. Giving them a budget was a huge mistake. They buy books on “management theory” or “self-actualization,” and they read them in between exit interviews. Worse, they believe what they read. These are books written by former Marketing phonies, intended to exploit the fact that many businesses are floundering and are grasping at straws. They are philosophical in nature, full of homilies and quotable truisms, designed to penetrate thick skulls and convince senior managers to invite the author to speak for $25,000.

This week, the Human Resources department at my company hosted Corporate Culture Training. I’m not quite willing to agree that culture can be taught, but the training wasn’t optional. Worse, we were required to read a horrible little book called “QBQ! The Question Behind the Question” by John G. Miller. The book is a quarter-inch thick, which barely qualifies as a book. The margins are broad, and the book is set in enormous type. Some of the chapters are only one paragraph long. I read it in 40 minutes. The theme is “Personal Responsibility” and the message is, “You can’t change anyone but yourself.”

So naturally, Human Resources tried to change us.

The head of Human Resources, a freakishly enthusiastic woman, hosted two sessions on consecutive days in a meeting room at a local hotel. She introduced the topic by telling us how she was going to show us five “magical” tools for managing our relationships “at work and at home.” This set my teeth on edge, because my relationships at home are none of her business.

There was the usual nonsense where we all had to introduce ourselves, even though we all know each other quite well. Then she presented the Human Resources Vision Statement, turning to make eye contact with everyone. Then she exclaimed how “wonderful and empowering” it was. This is it:

“Create a solutions-oriented environment where people can be at their best.”They must have worked on that for weeks.

Once she got rolling, she was cueing for approval and laughing at her own statements, engaged in a performance for which she expected applause. She used incredibly simplistic diagrams and lame concepts like “The Energy Circle” and “The Path of Life,” insisting that we write it all down, even though she gave us a folder with printouts of everything in it.

All of the material was presented in black-or-white scenarios, but as soon as someone pointed out circumstances where the lesson was counterproductive, she would backpedal and use words like “sometimes” or “on occasion,” grudgingly admitting to gray areas.

On the second day, she wanted to illustrate the concept of “dropping the ball,” a metaphor for failure, through the use of a metaphor – having us toss balls back and forth to one another.

Then, she assigned groups of five a topic, and gave us 10 minutes to prepare a skit to illustrate the topic. In other words, we were given a task for which we were unskilled, insufficient time to prepare, and guaranteed to fail. It was like watching prison theater - glum, confused, unwilling participants facing a glum, confused, unwilling audience.

Anyway, I left the training session with the following message: “Don’t blame others for failure, take action. If you fail, they’ll blame you.”

The Berry So Nice, You Pick It Twice

2009-08-09T10:52:00.006-05:00

Right about now, the state of Maine is groaning under the combined weight of the annual wild blueberry and raspberry crop, and of course, the trillions and trillions of mosquitoes. At least mosquitoes can fly, relieving some of the burden. But it’s up to us to pick those blueberries and raspberries to ensure that the state doesn’t snap off the continent and slide into the sea.

Unfortunately for us, evolution has gifted the lowly mosquito with one brilliant survival instinct. Instead of flying around randomly wasting precious energy looking for a source of warm blood, they wait patiently in blueberry and raspberry bushes, knowing full well that the blood will come to them.

To pick blueberries and raspberries, you have to get up very early in the morning. This is because it’s the coolest time of the day, when the mosquitoes are the most sluggish. This doesn’t mean that it’s actually cool, because even though it’s Maine, it’s still August. Maybe the temperature will be down around 65 – 70. So the mosquitoes are impaired, but not disabled.

Then, you must dress appropriately: long pants, closed shoes, high socks, and a hooded sweatshirt. Even in the cool of the morning, you sweat rivers in that getup from all the bending and stooping.

Finally, you have to cover the backs of your hands and your face in powerful insect repellant. Despite these precautions, black clouds of mosquitoes swarm around you, desperate for a taste of your precious bodily fluids.

There are two kinds of blueberry bushes: High Bush blueberries, and Low Bush blueberries. High Bush blueberry bushes produce a larger berry, and are easier to pick, so they’re grown in commercial blueberry operations. Maine is blessed with the other kind - the kind that grows about a foot off the ground, so you have to bend over for every damn berry. But it’s worth it. The Low Bush blueberries are much tastier.

Unfortunately, there’s only one kind of raspberry bush – the kind with thorns. When you pick raspberries in Maine, you lose a lot of blood to the mosquitoes and the thorns.

We brought our freshly-picked berries back to the camp, where they had to be “picked.” It seems that sweaty, blood-deprived berry-pickers are careless, and the berry buckets wind up with lots of junk in them besides berries. So someone has to pick through the berries to remove leaves, twigs, unripe berries, mosquito corpses and wood ticks. Coincidentally, the person who volunteered for this task is a woman whose maiden name is Berry.

J* made a batch of fresh nutmeg scones the next day and everyone enjoyed them with a fresh berry topping.

One evening, we decided to have a lobster dinner. Because lobsters are considered a luxury food item, the current economic situation has slashed demand. But the lobster fishermen are still bringing in lobsters, which means the supply hasn’t diminished at all. So the price of lobsters in Maine has dropped to $2.99 a pound, which means that they’re cheaper than hot dogs.

Here I am, sending one poor, undervalued crustacean to a horrible, unnatural fate.

Soon, we had hot steamed lobsters, and we prepared to sit down for a delicious meal.

D* and J* eat lobster pretty regularly, so J* has a lot of lobster-themed tableware, as you can see in this picture. I’d like you to pay particular attention to the butter-warmers at each table setting:

Soon, we were all tearing lobsters limb-from-limb and having a wonderful time, although I’m sure the lobsters would disagree. The discard plate looked like some kind of lobster holocaust:

We started clearing plates, and someone tossed their napkin onto the table carelessly. Within moments, one of the butter-warmers had set it ablaze. D* picked it up with a fork and doused it in the sink, where J* lamented its loss.

I love lobster, but blueberries don’t catch fire.