Saint Who?

Posted on February 14, 2012 by

Valentine? Oh, that guy. Patron Saint of Hallmark stores and the man single-handedly responsible for the senseless murder of countless innocent roses worldwide.

I don’t get it.

Love.  Sure, fine.  Love is great.  What I don’t get is why we need a specific day to celebrate it.  Shouldn’t it be an everyday thing? Why must I say “I love you” with overpriced chocolates and dying flowers? Why will those same chocolates and flowers be 50% off on February 15th? Does love no longer matter on that day?

What I need is a practical girl. A sensible girl. A girl who will appreciate me taking her out to dinner on Wednesday, when we can get free appetizers, instead of Tuesday, when a “Lovers’ Entree” is $39.00.  A girl who thinks ‘dressing up’ is me putting on a T-shirt without holes in it.  A girl who would appreciate a nice quality power tool as a gift, rather than a tiny piece of crystallized carbon some guy found in a hole in South Africa.

Where are the girls who would enjoy staying home tonight, ordering in, and playing a game of grown-up Scrabble, where any word is fair game and a Triple Word Score™ results in some very interesting scoring? How about one who would appreciate a card devoid of kittens, puppies, sparkly hearts, naked babies with primitive projectile weapons, and any other vestiges of this totally overblown “holiday”, and instead expressed love as a mathematical equation, complete with a graph?

Nerdy girls represent!

Sorry if I seem unromantic to many of you. I just don’t see the practicality of “Take her breath away with the diamond of her dreams”.  I’ll sure take her breath away when I tell her I can’t afford to go to the movies again until 2017.  How about an ice cream? How about a nice set of all-season radials?  I’d sure like you to not die in a car wreck – isn’t that love?  Doesn’t that say more than “Here’s some fudge. See, I love you.”??

I’m just confused.  How does promoting hyperglycemia indicate one’s desire for another person?  Does giving them fragrant flowers insinuate that they smell bad?  I’m not exactly the best with social conventions, but these things escape me.  Men get cologne as a gift, which says to me: “I don’t like the way you normally smell, so splash some of this on.”  Why would I want to smell like Calvin Klein anyway?  And frankly, that Old Spice guy scares me.

If the girl I’m with doesn’t know I love her without the timely application of flowers, chocolates, saccharine-sweet greeting cards, masked teddy bears, or mylar balloons on an arbitrary calendar day, then I’m either doing something terribly wrong on the other 364 days, or I’m with the wrong woman.

Happy February 14th.  Maybe it can serve as a reminder to say what you feel more often, but if it feels like an obligation to buy stuff, I think you might have to re-evaluate your priorities.

Don’t say you love her with flowers.  Give her some flowers, sure, but say it with your mouth.  Say it with your actions.  Do it tomorrow, too.  Mean it.

Posted in Pet Peeves | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Pessimist on a Plane

Posted on December 22, 2011 by

I freely admit that I don’t always see the bright side of things. If there’s a worst-case scenario, I’ll find it. If there isn’t one, I’ll make it up.

Just imagine what I can imagine when faced with the prospect of air travel. Keep in mind that I’m not terribly fond of people in general. People I don’t know – packed together like so many sardines (and often smelling like them) – that thought really pushes some buttons I’d rather not have pushed. I don’t think about things like “In the unlikely event of a water landing” or “In case of a loss in cabin pressure…” No, that’s too easy. I think about spending seven hours next to a hot, sweaty, gum-chewing, rap music-listening, elbow-poking, cologne- or perfume-soaked stranger with whooping cough and chronic halitosis. Behind me will invariably be seated a toddler, whose only spoken word is “MOMMY!”, and who will constantly kick the back of my seat, much to the amusement of his parents.

This, of course, assumes that I even make it to the plane. First, I will have to go through the humiliation of airport security, where the TSA will undoubtedly find something questionable in my carry-on luggage, or worse, my pants – and I will be forced to undergo a public feeling of my non-public areas, or have my collection of less-than-pristine underpants spread out for public viewing. Go ahead – push the button on my shaving cream can. Do you feel lucky…punk?

Surprisingly, there was no line at security, and I breezed right through without question. I didn’t even take off my belt. I suppose the fact that there are only seven people in Maine who can afford to fly and we don’t all travel at the same time had a lot to do with that. I was a bit disturbed that the “guard” who examined my ID and boarding pass appeared no older than twelve.

So, one potential disaster down, several hundred to go. Next, I need to find my gate. That must be all the way at the other end of the airport, some seventeen steps away. (Not much drama here, is there?) Finally I see the plane I will take for the first leg of my journey. It has propellers. Propellers! It’s 2011 and I’m getting on a plane with propellers on it. At least I was smart enough to pick a window seat so I’ll have an unobstructed view of the … engine. How lovely. I wonder what that liquid is that’s coming out of that panel…

Surprisingly, the propellers did not fly off and shred the cabin, nor did the spindly landing gear shear off unexpectedly on takeoff. The seat next to me was vacant, we took off on time, and my luggage fit into the overhead compartment. This was a bad omen. All of this good karma was bound to end in disaster.

Disaster came in the form of Newark, New Jersey. This is not an airport. It is a city unto itself. It is a shopping mall with convenient air service. It is the United Nations without the benefit of translators and diplomacy. My gates were so far apart my connecting flight needed a shuttle flight. Now I know why people buy luggage with wheels. I finally made it to my gate, all the while throwing dirty looks at the people riding on those glorified golf carts. How do I get a ride? All I got were those moving sidewalks – which I’m convinced are only there for the amusement of the people watching on closed-circuit TV as over-encumbered and disoriented travelers stumble on and off.

Anyway… I got to my gate, only to discover that it was no longer my gate. The same people who watched me clumsily ride the magic sidewalks deliberately changed my gate assignment just before I got there for the express purpose of watching me do it all over again. I know they did. I finally found the proper gate, and rewarded myself with a breakfast sandwich of sausage and egg on an English muffin purchased from a Chinese restaurant. It would seem that cultural boundaries are slightly blurred at 7 a.m. Entertainment was provided courtesy of a three-year-old girl at the next table, who happily poured orange juice all over her chair and promptly sat in it. She seemed very amused by the whole thing, unlike her father.

My layover was only and hour and forty minutes, so I hardly had time to fully appreciate the hard plastic seats in the terminal or the non-complimentary WiFi before it was time to once again line up like cattle destined for slaughter. This plane was a real jet – a 737, even. I don’t know when they started building those, but I do know that this was one of the first ones they made. Either that, or it had been deliberately retrofitted to look like something out of 1978. At least it has video screens in the seatbacks, so for eight bucks I can watch something insipid as I fly my next six-hour… *Crackle* “This is your captain – we regret to inform you that the entertainment system is out of order and will not be available for the entirety of the flight – our apologies for the inconvenience.” Well isn’t that just great.

There was only one empty seat on the plane, and it was next to me, so there was that bright spot – though my natural lack of self-esteem made me wonder if people knew they were going to be seated next to me and promptly made other travel plans. I also had the privilege of paying $8.50 for the world’s worst cheeseburger, and I learned the much-needed skill of urinating while standing sideways in turbulence six miles above the ground.  I will cherish those memories.

I finally reached my destination – cranky, jet-lagged, and seriously in need of a shower, a nap, and a lower density of human flesh per square foot. All I had to do was get through the crush of people in a hurry to get off the plane, walk nine miles through the terminal, find my rental car kiosk, sign papers, get on a shuttle bus, pick up my car, and drive for another hour.

Then I could start my vacation.

Posted in Pet Peeves | Tagged , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

I Have a New Respect for My Auto Mechanic

Posted on December 1, 2011 by

Some of you may know that I fix things for a living. For those of you who don’t – I fix things for a living. What they do is not terribly important for the purposes of this particular rant, and the technical details would probably make your eyes glaze over before you got to the good part. Instead, I’m going to employ a literary device known as a simile.  It might even evolve into a metaphor, but I’m certainly not ambitious enough to make it an allegory.

What I’m going to do is compare the thing I work on – which none of you will be familiar with – to something most of you should be at least casually familiar with: The family car.

Let’s say that I worked on cars for a living. I didn’t really do it for the general public – I got the cars the other mechanics couldn’t figure out how to fix. They would drop them off at my shop, I would do my magic, and they would be happy. I would be remunerated for my services and they could go back to changing oil and replacing spark plugs. Sometimes it’s a time-consuming job they don’t want to tackle. Sometimes it’s a part they don’t stock.

Sometimes it’s just stupid.

I don’t get to see these “cars” operating out on the streets, and I don’t talk directly to the owners to get an idea what the problem is. Instead, I have asked the people who send them to me to include a note outlining the problems they have observed. I thought the result would be obvious – I would get a cogent, detailed technical summary of what the problem was and what steps had already been tried. Nope. I got a large number of “cars” with notes that said “broken” or “not working”. Gee, thanks. Now, I can troubleshoot, but I might miss something if it’s not obvious. Let’s say your car stalls when you have the left blinker on and make a right turn – I’m not likely to test that particular scenario on a whim.

So, I asked for more detailed explanations on my repairs.

I will put what happened today into automotive terms. All names have been changed to protect the innocent.  I received a “car” along with a note that said, in effect, “please change all four tires”. I looked at the tires and they were in very bad shape. I hauled out my jack and my lug wrench, and I changed the tires. This seemed to me like something any ordinary mechanic could handle, but who am I to turn away business? Maybe he didn’t have any tires. Now, I like to be sure my work is done right, so I hop in to test drive the “car”. Huh. It won’t start. Looks like the battery is dead. So, I haul out a new battery and change that out, then try it again. It still won’t start. Several diagnostic steps later, I determine that the “car” has a blown engine. And a bad transmission. And there’s a hole in the radiator. And the lights don’t work.

I can only conclude from this that the prior troubleshooting went as follows: Car not go. Round things make car go. Round things must be bad. Need new round things.

Now I understand those faces my mechanic makes when I drop off my car. I’m a bit of a hobbyist auto mechanic, and I have a pretty good idea what I’m in for before I drop the car off. I might tell him: “It’s idling rough. I already replaced the IAC and tested the Mass Airflow sensor. I think it might be a vacuum leak.” He then scrunches up one side of his mouth and squints at me, as if saying “Yeah, sure, buddy. Why don’t you leave the car repairs to the grown-ups, OK?” To which I feel like screaming “Look, buddy, I’ve changed the oil cooler in a 2.8 liter SAAB V6, so don’t talk to me like I don’t know what I’m doing, OK?!” “I’ve seen the elephant. I’ve been there and done that. The reason I’m here is because you have a lift, it’s twenty degrees outside, and I don’t feel like busting my knuckles again to change out a stupid oxygen sensor.”

But I wouldn’t do that, because that would be snarky.

I think next time I drop off my car, I’ll just leave a note:

Dear Vinny,
My car is making a noise like this – Wooooooooommmmmmm…clunk. Please fix it.

Let him figure it out. That’s his job.

Posted in Pet Peeves | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Enviro-lemmings

Posted on October 7, 2011 by

Let me start by saying I care about the planet. I do. Really.

I recycle religiously, even though that means having to store up all of my plastic, glass, paper, cardboard, and whatever else qualifies and physically drive it to a collection point. You see, my town doesn’t have trash or recycling pickup – all trash has to be brought to the transfer station, where you pay an annual fee. Recycling can be dropped off there, or at several strategic locations around town. Food waste is composted at home – free fertilizer!

Almost all of the lights in the house have been switched to CFLs, because even though the bulbs cost more, the reduction in operating cost over the long haul is worth it. I even have some of the super-pricey dimmable ones.  I’ve added additional attic insulation, replaced drafty windows, and done all sorts of weather-proofing to maximize my heating dollars and to save energy. It makes sense – both economically and pragmatically – why waste energy and therefore dollars if you don’t have to?

Now we’re getting to my point: People who waste dollars to save pennies because it looks good. There’s a reason I drive a Honda Civic and not a Hummer. Actually, there are several reasons. I don’t need to compensate for anything, I’m not trying to impress anybody, and fuel economy in the single digits does not appeal to me. I bought the Honda because 40 MPG makes sense. It saves fuel, it saves me money, and I suppose it helps the planet in the long run by using fewer resources and emitting less pollution. Good.

Without getting into too much detail, part of my work involves providing our customers with electronic equipment for retail locations. I learned a few days ago that some of these locations are to be LEED certified, meaning they have to meet strict codes and requirements for design, construction, and operation. Part of this requirement is that all electrical appliances be Energy Star certified. Now that the government is involved, things get stupid.

In order to get the happy little green “Energy Star” sticker on a particular refrigerator, the customer needs to cough up an additional $190.00 over the cost of a similar refrigerator that is not Energy Star compliant. I researched the two models in question and found that the annual energy consumption of the Energy Star unit was $39, while the non-certified one was $49. Ten dollars per year. It would take nineteen years of continuous operation for that refrigerator to pay back the cost difference in energy savings.

I suspect that the only real difference between the two refrigerators is the sticker. OK, maybe the Chinese manufacturer added an additional capacitor to the motor starting circuit to save a couple of watts, increasing the wholesale cost of the unit by $.04. They also are probably producing said circuit boards in a coal-burning plant, soldering with pure lead, and happily dumping PCBs into the stream out back while they do it. What planet are we saving, exactly? And who is pocketing that $190.00? It sure isn’t me.

I’m betting that whoever came up with this “green” certification scheme did so while sitting in their Prius waiting in the drive-through line at Dunkin Donuts because they were too lazy to park and walk into the store. Who knows, they might get their Birkenstocks dirty. They were also willing to pay $4.00 for a cup of bitter hot water they could have made for pennies without leaving the house at all if they had cared to consider the environmental impact of their trip. These are probably the same people who leave those styrofoam coffee cups on the shelves in my supermarket when they’re tired of slurping out of them. I’m also betting that these folks use more power than that refrigerator “saves” just by leaving their iPad chargers plugged in while they’re not in use. Can we say “hypocrite”?

I’m not for clear-cutting the rainforests.
Or clubbing baby seals.
Or whaling.
I’m not for dumping our garbage at sea.
I’m also not for Big Oil.
Or “Drill, baby, drill!”

I’m for common sense. For doing things not just because they are popular or they make you feel good about yourself, but because they do real good. Separating my trash makes sense. Using energy-saving lights makes sense. Buying an expensive hybrid today because they are politically popular, while ignoring the fact that in twenty years the toxic pile of expended lithium-ion batteries will far exceed any perceived energy savings is short-sighted in my book. So is spending an extra $190 on a refrigerator to save less than $.03 a day on your electric bill.

Take that $190 and do something useful with it. Donate it. Feed the Children. Help the Homeless. Save the Whales. Heck, buy ten cases of beer. Just be sure to recycle the cans.

If you really feel the need to be “green” and spend the extra money for that refrigerator, put those three cents a day to good use. Maybe turn on a light and read a book.

Posted in Pet Peeves | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Hello, My Poor Blog

Posted on October 5, 2011 by

Alas, I have been absent for a while. Although my attention has been mostly elsewhere, I have not forgotten you.

Now that I have suffered the indignity of having my insides videotaped from both ends, and it has been confirmed that everything that should be in there is in there, and nothing that shouldn’t be there (like six-letter words that start with “C”, for example) can be found, maybe I can get back to some normalcy.

Of course, it is rather depressing when your doctor gives you an itemized list of the foods that will irritate your particularly nasty case of reflux, and it consists of all of the things you enjoy.  And the drugs make you dizzy. And give you abdominal cramps. And depression. And anxiety. And sleep disorders. And each office visit to the gastroenterologist is $390.oo. And it’s an hour away.

At least I can sleep better now, knowing that I don’t have any of the wonderful things my family doctor mentioned. Things like a hiatal hernia, Barrett’s Esophagus, esophageal cancer, colon cancer, ulcers, ciliac disease, or any of the myriad other disorders splashed in living color across glossy literature in the gastro suite.

This is what I get for telling my doctor I have heartburn more than twice a week – you know, like the commercials on TV tell you. “Be sure to consult your doctor if you suffer from heartburn more than twice a week.” Now I know. I have to admit I was a bit concerned, given my family history and an episode two years back involving the other end of the digestive highway.

So, my neglected blog, I will do my best to dust off the cobwebs and get back to some writing. I’m sure I have some things to say, and not just about my guts.

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Just Another Day

Posted on August 11, 2011 by

Sometimes a day at work goes bad right from the start.

8:30 AM – Lights flicker ominously
8:31 AM – BLAM. Total power failure
8:32 AM – 8:35 AM – Run around shutting down office computers before their battery backups die (lesson learned from previous power failures – corrupted Access databases are not fun)
8:36 AM – Realize that we are open for business and we have no phones (call center)

Our office is in a very rural area, and we’re at the end of the power line. Usually when the power goes out, it’s out for a while. Because of this, we have a generator. It’s on wheels and it weighs approximately nine thousand pounds. (I’m exaggerating. It only weighs as much as a small moon.) It also comes with a convenient handle that is perfectly designed to allow you to neither push nor pull the generator with any success. It is just short enough that pulling it allows the generator to run over your heels as you drag it behind you like a reluctant dog, and it is at precisely the wrong angle to balance the weight of the generator while trying to push it. Unless of course you look forward to impaling yourself on a steel pipe. I, for one, do not. It does not help matters at all that the wheels supplied with this particular generator were designed to support approximately one-tenth of the weight they are currently holding. The ensuing flat spots don’t do much for their rolling ability, but do ensure that it will never build enough momentum to run away from you should you encounter a downhill slope.  Perhaps if the manufacturer had put four wheels on it instead of just two… no, it’s Sears – what was I thinking?

8:37 – 8:45 – Wrestle backup generator from storage in the garage all the way around the building to the basement door near the phone system.
8:46 – Fight my way through a wall of cobwebs in the little-used basement. Ignore the creepy, long-legged, pale house spiders that inhabit these webs. Wonder silently why we don’t see any mice, and what these spiders eat to survive.
8:48 – Open basement door, exposing spiders to sunlight for the first time this year. Ignore skittering sounds.
8:50 – Run 25-foot extension cord from generator to phone unit.
8:52 – Discover that I in fact need a 27-foot extension cord.
8:57 – Success! Now have 23 feet of extra extension cord, since all I have are two 25-foot cords
9:00 – 9:14 – Pull starter rope – stall – repeat – stall – repeat – repeat. Chug…….chug……chug..chug..gasp..chug.chug.chugchugchugchug
9:15 – Generator is running!!!
I have vanquished the dark. I have risen beyond the limits of my cave-dwelling ancestors and I have created electricity! With a machine! I am all-powerful! I…
9:16 – Power comes back on.
9:18 – 9:27 – Wrestle generator back around to storage area, coil extension cords. Some bad words may have been uttered at this time.
9:35 – Begin the work day sweaty and frustrated!

At least it’s summer – I didn’t have to dig a path through the snow.

What do those spiders eat? There are so many of them, and some of them are big.

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Sunday Non-Sequitur

Posted on July 31, 2011 by

I’m going to do something a little different this time. I saw something today that I want to write about, but I’m going to describe the scene to you and let you run with it in the comments. We’ll see where it goes, and if conversation gets lively I’ll jump in with what I’ve been thinking. Here goes:

I was driving down my street this morning around 11:00. My road is somewhat rural – two lanes with a posted speed limit of 55MPH. Walking along the side of the road was a woman of, let’s say ‘ample proportions’, wearing a purple mu-mu and flip-flops, smoking a cigarette, and carrying (here’s the clincher) -  a sledgehammer. Casually, over her shoulder.

What I would like to know is, what was this woman on her way to do, or what was she on her way back from doing?

Who’s got the best story?

Posted in Humor | Tagged , | 8 Comments