Chapbook

[sasha]

It's fortunate you're mechanically inclined enough to navigate that territory with some conficence - I'm a mechanical idiot, an unrecontrucated klutz....

I've got an oil-fired forced hot air system, & until 2014 was running the same furnace since the house was built (1974, I think). For years, I nursed it along "for just one more season", until the exhaust pipe rusted through right next to the air inlet. The furnace was so old the parts weren't even manufactured any more. The tech said he "might be able to cobble something up", but now it was a safety issue, so I bit the bullet & replaced the furnace outright. A week later, I burned out my water pump (forgot that I even had a water filter, & had allowed it to silt up completely) - thousands in repairs - and a few weeks after that I lost my job - laid off. I felt like a CW song....

Fortunately, I was given 6-mo severance, which sustained me up to retirement age... I've been a free agent since....

[saw]

My house was built in 1920....so that furnace was actually 95 years old.....essentially from a time when things were built to last close to a century.....there are refrigerators in Baltimore running in people's basements built in the 40's......but capitalism could not survive if we kept building necessities to last "forever ".......I bought a brand new kitchen range in 1995. by 2001 it stopped working. A young college kid working part time for this appliance company came out. Since he didn't plan to make appliance repair a career, he came clean. He said the electronics in this model is built to fail, and it's so expensive to replace, you may as as well buy a newer model that's more expensive and will probably last longer....WTF ?

[sasha]

that's one of my newer rants - the linguistic shift of "customer service" from "how might we better serve our customers" to "how can we get our customers more compliant with our wishes?" They've got us by the balls and they know it, and they gleefully shake us down without an ounce of shame. "Don't like it? Take your business next door. They're even worse." I've already groused about the bland uniformity of product offerings - no more "just right", only "it'll do" (viewtopic.php?f=98&t=34270#p221117) but marketing has taken over as the dominant force in consumer sales. "Buy - or not, we don't care."

(in regard to the linked rant - I ended up buying a camera bag that looked ok online, but turned out to be a flimsy, cardboard piece of shit. My sister was able to sew a new strap onto my old Tamrac, so I'm back in business, and all it cost me was pint of her favorite ice cream as payment.)

[sasha]

Gotcha...

I once worked in Quality Control for a manufacturer of single-use medical products - hypodermics, trach tubes, catheters, procedural kits, and the like. It wasn't so much by choice as by necessity - I'd been laid off from the engineering job I'd held for 22 years when the company disbanded its R&D department; and had spent the better part of another year burning up my severance trying to find a similar position that wouldn't require me to relocate. I ended up back on the bottom rung, with vague assurances that I'd been hired "to get me in there". But after 10 months with only a few indifferent nibbles, I was grateful just to have someplace to go every day. (It eventually palled, but that's a different story.)

You've seen those hypodermic needles with the orange plastic thingie dangling off the business end? That's a protective sheath that snaps into place around the needle after use, protecting against accidental jabs. We not only sold them, we invented them. (I say "we", though the patents were issued long before I started there.) We didn't manufacture them ourselves, but subcontracted that task to an injection molding house an hour or so away. It was one of our high-volume products, and therefore beloved of those whose livelihoods were directly tied to sales revenue.

So when these sheaths started flunking Incoming Inspection, management took notice, and directed one of the engineers to look into it. He, in turn, asked my supervisor for a "resource" to work with him. That became me.

Christian Schultz was a bulky, amiable fellow who took his responsibilities seriously. He was more than capable, but a worrier, and for every bright light on the horizon, he was apt to obsess over the shadows they cast. If he hadn't worn his vulnerability so openly on his sleeve, his hand-wringing might have become tiresome; but his gloomy predictions were never considered pissing and moaning; rather, more like a stammer or a favorite catch phrase, it was all "oh, that's just Chris." He was a good choice for the job - not only technically competent, but personable & likeable, traits useful for pressuring the supplier into meeting our specifications.

While I'd never worked closely with him before, we weren't strangers. I'd done the occasional ad hoc measurements for him, and we'd both taken part in the usual lab-bench bull sessions; so we knew each other well enough that the step from workplace acquaintances to collaborators was an easy one. I knew him well enough not to give his kvetching undue weight, and he knew me well enough to trust that all I needed was an idea of what to look for, without a detailed tutorial on how to find it. And we both had other duties to attend to, so we weren't married. I've been in unpleasant professional relationships; this was not one of them.

We spent weeks struggling with these tolerance issuess. They didn't yet adversely affect product performance, but if they continued they might, and needed to be addressed before we had to start issuing recalls. He spent a lot of time at their facility showing them our inspection reports and trying to convey the urgency of getting their molds back into compliance. He'd return late each day with sacksful of test parts whose critical dimensions I'd check the next day, and compare to those on the blueprints. It was tedious work, and I had to give him a lot of bad news. Weeks turned into months, but gradually, imperceptibly, the numbers began coming back within their spec limits, and when the statistics finally gave the thumbs up, we began to feel the problem was resolved. Looking over my latest data sheets, he sighed with cautious relief, and shook his head with a little smile. "Boy, will I be glad to put this project to bed!"

I couldn't have agreed more, but his open optimism seemed so out of character, I wanted to comment on it - and I couldn't resist a puckish impulse to sweeten the moment with a little vinegar. "Well," I said, "it could still be a while yet. I heard from Freddie (one of the supplier's mold operators) that their material supplier is using a dye that will become unavailable by the end of the quarter. They're already looking at alternatives."

Per FDA rules, such a change in raw materials would require any medical product using that polymer to be requalified. We'd be repeating what we'd just been through, but with full performance testing, for a dozen other products as well. The expression on his face went in rapid succession from relief to confusion, disbelief, horror, and despair; I briefly wondered if I'd gone too far. I let it go on for a three-count before taking mercy on him: "Chris - I'm busting your balls." The expression changed again, to chagrin, annoyance, back to wary hopefulness, at which point he started to laugh. "You bastard!" he said. "You bastard!" He leaned back and roared with unabashed relief, and gestured to the vision system we'd become so intimate with. "I outta chain you to that thing!"

He never completely shed his reserve with me, but he smiled at me more when we passed in the halls, and seemed a tad more relaxed in our future dealings.

[saw]

aah the old "break through"...or in dating we'd say the "old icebreaker"......I think we all at times throw up walls to protect ourselves, and if neither party cares to initiate entry through one the doorways , those walls remain erect, and the doors remain bolted tightly

[sasha]

so true - I hadn't actually thought of this as more than a snapshot of workplace dynamics, but that undercurrent is always there. It can run the other way, too - we've all probably extended a hand in friendship only to get it caught in the gears....

[sasha]

 
Eyes Right

5/6/2026 - Had my follow-up Ophthalmology visit with Jaeger today, the one I canceled last month because of the surprise snowstorm that left the roads slicker than I was comfortable with. This was to assess how effectively the 2nd laser surgery on my right eye was keeping the glaucoma tamped down. Results were very encouraging, but no warranty is stated or implied - it looked good after the 1st operation, too.

As long as you're here, he said, why don't we just give you the once over? So I said sure. I see my regular ophthalmologist next week, the more data we can give her now, the more informed her exam can be. So he dilated my pupils for the retinal scan - "Big Eye", I call it. He left to find a technician to run the scan, and with nothing to do but look around me, I looked around me.

The room gradually brightened as the drops took effect. My glances kept returning to the device attached to my chair by an articulated arm, a structure holding a carousel of lenses that could be rotated into position before an eyepiece - and for some reason, a pair of joysticks at its base. I had leaned over for a closer look at these, and was fiddling with them when an attractive young woman maybe in her 20s bustled in. I immediately (and somewhat guiltily) abandoned my exploration and sat back into the chair. "Did I startle you?" she laughed.

Funny how as you get older, all pretty young women remind you of your daughter. Must be nature's way of protecting us from making fools of ourselves. So I just leaned back into the seat and said a bit sheepishly "I was just checking out these joysticks." She seemed a bit at a loss, but otherwise not too put off by it. I felt maybe some further justification was called for. "Engineers never really retire," I added. "We just get old." She laughed graciously enough, and looked through the paperwork she'd brought with her to find out what to do with me.

She led me through a warren of corridors to a little unlit room where she photographed the inside of each of my eyeballs, and after leading me back, disappeared to deliver the results. Jaeger rejoined me a few minutes later with the news: little or no further degradation in either eye, from the glaucoma in the right, nor the macular degeneration in the left. Both a bit cloudy from cataracts, but not yet requiring removal. Keep up the daily eyedrops, see you next time.

An eye-squinting glare greeted me as I stepped outside and accompanied me across the parking lot. I hadn't brought a pair of the disposable tinted eyeglass inserts usually provided after the procedure, because dilation hadn't been on the original schedule. And then, assuming that the drizzly overcast would at least partly compensate for the medication's effect, I hadn't asked for a set at the desk on my way out. And the glare wasn't the only issue - the procedure also seems to blur my vision slightly, wrapping everything in a filmy haze. This was going to be an interesting drive home.

It wasn't until I climbed into the car and strapped in that I remembered there were a pair of insert shades somewhere in the center console, left over from a previous visit - so I rummaged about until I found them. They were dusty and smudged with thumbprints, but they'd have to do. I cleaned them best I could, and slipped them onto my glasses.

Better, but only marginally. Better than nothing, I supposed.

I'd planned on stopping at Market Basket to pick up a few items I'd forgotten on my weekly grocery run; but now concluded I didn't need them badly enough to negotiate the three traffic circles I'd have to cross to get there. I considered the other routes out of town, gauging the amount of traffic and other distractions I might encounter at each, and picked the one likeliest to minimize those variables. Let's do this, I thought, and started the engine. Once the on-board computer had booted up, the sound system came to life right where it had left off, in the middle of the sax solo in Snarky Puppy's "Broken Arrow". I shut the audio system off. I was going to need all input channels to get myself clear of the city and through highway construction on Route 12 before reaching the relative safety of the back roads.

A light, sporadic rain had begun to fall, the kind of rain that intermittent wiper settings are meant for. I let them run continuously. My vision didn't need the additional blurring from rain puddling on the windshield between wipes.

There's no need to describe each leg of the voyage in detail - I drove slowly enough to observe, process, and absorb the details around me, but not so slowly as to call undue attention to myself. The road construction wasn't the gauntlet I'd feared, just a matter of driving on the wrong side of the road between the traffic cones. There was a marked drop in traffic once I peeled off Rte 12 onto 119; and after turning from there onto East Lake Road, I felt Home, even with 5 miles to go. I know every inch of that road, intimately.

It's the kind of intimacy that goes beyond "Oh, I know where this road goes" - it's a deeper, more thorough intimacy that almost lets you negotiate it by feel alone. It's not just familiarity with the curves and bumps of each particular stretch, but knowing with your muscles what stretch follows whichever one you're on. You don't think about when to nudge the steering wheel, or ease up on the accelerator, or up- or downshift - you just DO it. You just know the feel of that curve up Webb Hill, where you can see far enough ahead to cross over the center line when you need a little momentum in icy conditions, because even if someone appears around the bend, you've got more than enough time to scootch back over onto your own side; or that curve by the lake, where you've got to be on the lookout for dog-walkers; or that funny little bump-bump at the join between the paving operations from 2018 and 2021. You just know what the road's going to say before it actually says it.

I met only one other car on this final leg before finally pulling into my driveway. I think it was Wayne, probably on his way to the dump. I couldn't see clearly enough be sure, but waved anyway. Don't know if he waved back. Either way, doesn't matter - I'd made it home in one piece, and had been assured my eyesight would be with me for a while longer yet. Once the eyedrops had worn off, anyway.
 

[saw]

When you arrive essentially in one piece into your seventies, there are a myriad of chores to take care of in maintaining that wholeness ( though wholeness would be a slight exaggeration ) We tend to grasp tightly to our independence. We need eyes that work ( among other things )...and to be truly independent we need to be able to drive ourselves to our appointments and return in that one piece, as I mentioned earlier. So I can definitely relate to your story, Roy.

On May 1st of this year a speeding driver creamed my daughter in law's car, then mine. I fear a 2012 Elantra will end up being a total loss given the damage she incurred . Sadly that would be a terrible injustice given there are only 83,00 miles on the odometer. Hell, Hyundai gives a 100,00 mile warranty...or 10 years which ever comes first. Obviuosly I hid the 10 years first.

The Perpetrator claims his wheel fell off, and he lost control of the car.....and sure enough 15 ft. in front of my car I could see a tire there. Upon examination there was also a wheel and a broken axle....the guy was driving so fast he ended up in the middle of the next block.....keep in mind...on 3 wheels !......the gouge in the asphalt well past my car suggests the impact of smashing into 2 vehicles is likely whay dislodged the wheel and the tire with it and also broke his axle....

Baltimore City now subs out all vehicle collisions to a company called OSS...we called the police, and this is what showed up...an OSS agent...right away I realize there is no authority here to perform a breathalyzer.....well that sucks....
So the driver ( and there is only one in this case, since my daughter in law were in the house ) will be giving documents to Agent Woodberry of the OSS....and doesn't need to talk to us....the bottom line is we do not know if the other driver was insured. We asked Agent Woodberry, and he said he gave me an insurance card that was expired...great !....sure wish there was a cop around.

Marisa has Geico and I have Allstate....and both 10 days after the crash will only say the accident is still under investigation.

So we wait.

I provided an email address to Allstate for OSS with the sequence number, the CAD number and the name of the investigator. Therefore an officially sanctioned by Baltimore city invesitgation has already taken place.

Still we wait.

Still we can't drive anywhere.

Oh, shit...I have a doctor's appointment tomorrow

Oh I'll just borrow Marisa's car


Oh wait !!