Archive for the 'Vignettes' Category

Two dogs, one skunk

Published on September 15, 2008 in General and Vignettes. 3 Comments

Midweek last week, Susan heard the dogs scuffling on the side of the house and tried to call them in. She saw a flash of white and thought maybe they were after a cat, but she caught a whiff of skunk and quickly closed the door then called for me in a minor panic. I was in the midst of a Team Fortress 2 match and couldn’t really hear her - all I heard was urgency in her voice. I knew she was downstairs making pickles and was thinking…who has a pickle emergency?!? But after the second time she called for me I came downstairs and could immediately smell the skunk. Still - what could we do? I opened the door and Nori, our black lab, was up on the porch waiting to come in. Soolin was out of sight. I could smell skunk in the air but when I sniffed Nori I couldn’t really smell it, so after running my hands over her I let her in then started calling for Soolin. She came up onto the porch tossing her head about, a thick white froth covering her mouth and chin and a long dribble of drool spraying about. Susan and I were a bit freaked by her appearance and behavior - she kept tossing her head violently, smacking her lips, and drooling profusely. I sniffed her and while the smell of skunk was very strong in the air, she smelled more of chemicals, like windex or something. We brought her inside, confused, as I kept sniffing at her mouth and wiping away all her drool. We started to panic a bit, fearing that she had ingested chemicals or something toxic, based on her behavior, the lack of a skunk smell on her, and the drool. Susan called the vet and pretty quickly we headed off to the animal hospital, expecting that Soolin was going to have her stomache pumped.

By the time we got halfway to the animal hospital we had concluded it really was a skunk we were dealing with, not chemicals. We couldn’t explain the different smells, but the way my car reeked made it clear that it was skunk on them.

It cost me $100 for the vet to confirm this, and I ended up feeling pretty foolish. Susan and I had a really long night - we had to put the dogs in a tub and scrub them with a solution made up of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, dish soap and water. The good news is aside from their faces, which we couldn’t scrub so assidiously, the dogs smell ok. The bad news is the odor lingers around our house and most especially in my car, which absolutely reeks. Based on a conversation with a co-worker who also ended up with a skunked car, I’m going to pay someone to detail it and ask them to focus on steam cleaning the upholstery, we’ll see if that clears it up.

[update] I forgot to mention the reason Soolin was drooling and frothing at the mouth. She took the skunkblast straight to the face and mouth, which is why she was so agitated and drooley. The vet told us it was harmless, but you can imagine how disgusting this must have been, even for a creature acustomed to the occasional snack on some other dog’s poop.

Entertaining thread on metafilter about Action Park

Published on July 27, 2008 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

Andrew pointed me over to an entertaining thread about Action Park, the long closed and fabulously dangerous first person amusement park* that I used to go to a couple of times a year back in the mid 80’s through the early 90’s, and I couldn’t help contributing my favorite little vignette from my times in the park to the thread. The thread starts here on metafilter, and my contribution is here. As a teaser to incent the clickage, the story involves an unwelcome enema. How can you resist clicking through to discover how that could happen at an amusement park!

* first person because most of the rides featured you putting your body in some form of harm’s way, be it on a waterslide, alpine slide, running down rapids in a tube, or jumping off a platform on a bungie cord.

Spoiler below! Don’t read till you’ve read the metafilter story!

I should add that I didn’t tell the whole story over on metafilter because I figured no one would believe me, but the coda was, after Brian and I waddled over to the first men’s room we could find, we opened the door to discover a little kid who had absolutely exploded with diarrhea and was standing in the middle of the bathroom in obvious distress. We couldn’t figure out what to do about the kid, and after a brief mexican standoff we both retreated and waddled off in search of another bathroom, both of us unwilling to use the completely soiled one.

~22 hours in airplane hell

Published on June 17, 2008 in Vignettes. 5 Comments

So, I’m back. I’ll write up how the trip went with some pictures over the next week or so, but I had to tell the unfortunate tale of airplane hell I went through yesterday. My original itinerary was: Seattle depart, 11:22 PM. Arrive Chicago at 5:40AM’ish. Wait for next plane which departed at 6:25, arrive Hartford before noon. Instead what happened was:

1) Seattle plane delayed by 20 minutes, which was then delayed another 40 minutes because they sent a guy onto the plane with a cat carrier which wouldn’t fit under the seat, only the baggage folks didn’t agree, bickered, sent people onto the plane to play tetris with the cat carrier (trying to stuff it under various seats), until they finally made the guy check the cat in as baggage. During the flight, I get 3′ish hours of fitful sleep.

2) Arrive Chicago at 6:30. Rush frantically to gate on the other side of the airport to witness my plane rolling away from the gate. Talk to customer service - get waitlisted on an 11:45AM flight. Get coffee, wander terminal, curse my fate for 5′ish hours. Try to get on flight, fail.

3) Fallback plane, I have a guaranteed seat on a 1:12 PM flight. Wander terminal. More cursing of fate. Watch as plane gets delayed in 20 minute increments, for 3 hours, moving from gate to gate as it gets reshuffled to other gates as part of this process. Watch in bemusement as the terminal starts to get overstuffed with people on delayed flights due to thunderstorms on the east coast.

4) Finally start boarding at 4:15, we are warned as we board that we may have problems due to the thunderstorms.

5) Arrive Hartford and are told we can’t land. Spend ~45 minutes circling at 32k feet in a tight spiral, until we have to bail due to low fuel. Diverted to Syracuse where we have a rough landing due to storms. Spend more than 2 hours stuffed in a hot, muggy, stinky, not air conditioned plane waiting for the storms to pass so they can refuel us. They run out of drinks before the drink tray makes it to us.

6) finally take off and have a rough flight to Hartford, where we land around 11PM, ending with me almost to the point of kissing the pavement I am so pleased to have escaped from airline hell. I speed off at 80MPH with a trail of mist behind me in the rain, grateful to finally be in control of my own fate again.

Thankfully the trip was really excellent which offsets the horrible flight experience. I’ll write more about that later.

Handy tip - don’t beat upon toner cartridges with a hammer

Published on September 17, 2007 in Techno Geek and Vignettes. 1 Comment

Here’s another in the amusing ‘Dave is occasionally an idiot’ series of posts.

I got a new color laser printer, the Samsung 300P, and spent last weekend printing a bunch of stuff to test it. To my surprise, after less than 60 pages the red toner cartridge claimed to be out of ink. This pissed me right off since one of the prime motivating factors in my buying this printer was to escape the ‘inkjet ink is more expensive than human blood’ syndrome. I was convinced there was still plenty of toner left in the cartridge but no amount of shaking, cursing and configuring could force the printer to recognize that. Angry yet at the same time curious as to what was going on, I proceeded to try and break open the toner cartridge.

This printer uses cartridges that look like oversized film cannisters, and I knew there was some risk of a mess so I took it out into the yard. Various efforts to pry it open all failed so finally in a fit of who gives a shit I started bashing it with a hammer, which caused it to pop like a balloon, showering me in violent pink powder.

So, I was right. There WAS plenty of toner left in the thing, but now it was all over me. I cleaned off in the hose, laughing at myself but still irked that I had to drop ~$40-50 on a new cartridge when there was nothing wrong with the old one besides being clogged or something. From now on I’m going to periodically pull the cartridges out and shake them about to try and prevent this from happening again.

There’s a coda to this story too - my yard got a dusting with this stuff. I wandered around with the hose trying to wash it away, and we had rain as well, but still, while playing with the dog yesterday I noticed Soolin’s water had taken on a distinct pinkish hue - the toner was getting into her drinking water, probably via the ball as it picked it up from the grass. There’s also a pink stream tracing the flow of the rainwater that follows the contours of my driveway.

Aside from the annoyance with the red toner cartridge, the printer’s decent. I now have a monochrome samsung ML 17something looking for a home, if anyone’s in the market for a laser printer on the cheap.

When fleas attack: Flee!

Published on July 6, 2007 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

For about two years in college I lived with my friend Will. His Dad had purchased a house adjacent to campus as an investment and many of us rented rooms in it over my years at Wooster. It was a great investment for him I guess, and it’s actually now a part of the college campus. During the summer between the first and second years in the house, Will rented it out to some folks, a couple of whom were friends of ours. These friends agreed to take care of the cats of other folks who had headed home for the summer, so the house ended up with a large cat population. In the latter half of the summer the folks living in the house decided to make a road trip to the west coast. They couldn’t figure out what to do about the cats, so the geniuses bought several huge bags of cat litter and dumped them into what had been the coal room in the basement of the house. They then bought the largest sack of dry catfood they could find and slit it open and left it laying in the middle of the kitchen. Then they split for the west coast.

Will and I knew none of this when we showed up a couple of days before classes were to start to settle into the house. We opened the house and gods, the stench! Dust bunnies, dry cat food, and hairballs were all over the kitchen, and aside from the cat food, scattered through the rest of the house. The worst though was the basement, which was so rank it was hard to go into it without gagging on the smell. Meanwhile there were no cats to be seen.

Needless to say, we were pissed. We spent hours shoveling the ugly mess in the basement into bags, vacuuming, wiping up dried cat yuck, and mopping out the kitchen. During this we both noticed there were fleas around but it was all part of the broader mess and we didn’t think much of it. After a couple of hours we finished a first pass on the house and went out to pickup a pizza. When we got back we settled into the living room with some beer and the pie.

What happened next was mind blowing. Within 5-10 minutes of settling into the couch we were both attacked by hordes of ravenous fleas. I’m not talking dozens or hundreds, I’m talking hundreds of thousands of the little bastards. We both were starting to frantically scratch ourselves and while so doing I pulled down my sock and my ankle was literally black with fleas, it was astounding. We ended up running from the house in a frenzy to escape, out in the backyard scratching and spraying ourselves down with a hose. We both feared to reenter the house. I ended up staying with my Aunt and Uncle. I can’t remember where Will headed off to.

It took us weeks to completely purge that house of fleas. We had to go through several rounds of bug bombing which required us to abandon the house for a day then return to vacuum and scrub.

As to why they all suddenly attacked, all I can do is speculate. We had been in motion for the rest of the time in the house, so maybe the fact that we were finally still for a while gave them the chance to all beat a leaping path to us. Or maybe the couch was the locus of the infestation. I don’t really know. As to our friends and the state of the house, basically no one would fess up. When they got back and discovered how pissed off we were it turned into a finger pointing game with no one willing to admit they were responsible.

Meanwhile, not that I was ever a fan, but MAN do I loathe fleas after that experience.

Don’t eat the yellow snow

Published on June 15, 2007 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

While I don’t comment on it much here, I was in a very raucous co-ed fraternity in college. We threw the best parties by far, for at least a couple of years we had the largest membership of any of the social groups on campus, and for 2 of the years my house was ground zero for party central. My friend’s Dad bought a house that was adjacent to campus as an investment property and we lived there, host to more keg parties than I can possibly recall. We were the generation who grew up thinking Animal House defined what college life was like, cartoonish as it was, and on several levels we strove to live up to the standards set in the movie.

We had our fraternity pledge party at the house for several years, and one of those years it was an absolutely brutally cold night, as in you could spit and it would freeze almost immediately. We had the kegs out on the back porch, and there was a balcony up above it that connected to my bedroom. At one point several of us were standing out on the porch braving the cold, smoking cigarettes and shooting the breeze. A friend of our, so drunk he could barely walk, came out of the house and made his way down the steps. There was a sheet of plywood at the foot of the stairs that we had put there because in the preceding week it had become so muddy that it sucked trying to get into the house. None of us knew it, but a thin veneer of ice had formed on the plywood, and when his foot hit that his legs went out from under him. He ened up sprawled on his back at the foot of the stairs, all of us including him laughing.

As he collapsed, what appeared to be snow started to fall over the plywood. Our friend stuck out his tongue and started to try and catch flakes with his mouth, rolling on the plywood, a huge grin on, giggling like a little kid. ‘It’s snowing, it’s snowing!’ he was saying.

I noticed the snow mysteriously seemed to be falling in a very localized area around the plywood, so I poked my head over the edge of the porch to figure out what was happening. I looked up and saw another friend on the balcony above relieving himself over the railing. Barely able to stop laughing I turned to the guy on the plywood and said ‘umm, that’s not snow dude…’

Fortunately for him he was too drunk to realize, and as the snowfall ceased he gathered himself up and wandered off into the night. I’ll never forget the look of childlike delight on his face as the ’snow’ came down though and I still laugh to think of it.

My favorite pranks: Dave as network tormentor

Published on May 21, 2007 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

My favorite pranks: Dave as network tormentor

In the mid-late 90’s I worked for the nascent internet division of a communications company that owned small market television stations and newspapers. I actually helped found that division. This was in the dark days of the Macintosh, before Jobs came back, when their product was really starting to fall behind windows, when their product line ballooned to the point where I think they had a different model number for every potential customer, and (for a while), when they were still trying to charge $99 for the tcp/ip stack you needed to connect macs to the internet over a network (!!! - I can admit this now, I never paid, I considered it a ripoff and pirated it for everyone. Within a couple years they did the right thing and provided it as part of the OS). Anyway despite all these troubles we were a mac-only shop largely due to my efforts, and I sat in the middle of a networked web of 20-30 macs. This was also back when networks in an office were novel, and the PC guys from the parent company still didn’t have any of the PC’s networked.

One downside to being at the center of this hub of macs was that I was tech support for everyone. Macs used to crash at the drop of a hat or if you, say, sneezed while clicking the mouse, or most famously to me at the time, if you connected to the internet using pop3, disconnected, then reconnected. But I digress. The long and short of it was this was a huge pain in the ass, and I was supporting a lot of non-computer savvy folks. Mac’s ease of use actually worked against me in this circumstance, because any of the fool salespeople could download stuff like, say, a doohickey which would put candy canes all around the edges of their screens, but then their machines would crash, I would show up like the grinch and remove all their third party addon crap, reboot the machine, and viola, problem solved. Usually.

The problem was this lead to a sort of adversarial relationship with the staff - everyone loved their third party crap, macs crashed no matter what you did, and though my methods had the best of intentions and were generally effective at reducing the frequency of crashes, folks began to resent it.

Factor in my sense of humor and a little known and poorly documented feature of Appletalk (mac’s built in networking) back in the day and you get a long running series of my some of my favorite pranks. See, there was a method you could use to send a message directly to the screen of any of the macs on the network, which would pop up on the target mac in a box that looked very much like the standard mac crash/error dialog box. So, say you’re sitting there typing one day and suddenly this error pops up:

Keystroke Frequency error: 1094
Keyboard input exceeding buffer tolerance. Reduce keystroke frequency.

or:

Mouse accelerometer malfunction: 0xAE EEE3
Mouse controller maximum input velocity exceeded. Reduce excessive speed of mouse movement.

or:

CDROM tray lubrication deficiency: EEE3
Lubrication sensors indicate primary cdrom bay controller issue. To confirm this error please execute an open/close cycle on the primary CDROM drive 10 times. If error message persists, see technical support.

Revenge for dumb tech support help requests is a dish best served cold but with an opportunity for laughter was my theory. Call me into your office for the 3rd time because the solitaire game you were playing instead of working crashed your laptop again? OK, I’m going to the well for the third time with some ridiculous error message sent your way that’ll have you in my office trying to explain why you think your keyboard (on a laptop) needs replacing, or asking me for CDROM grease, or whatever. I had dozens of these.

So yeah, I was pretty much the BOFH in some ways but there was an undercurrent of humor to it and I still laugh to think of these to this day.

Great small world story

Published on May 7, 2007 in Vignettes. 2 Comments

So I lost touch with my main girlfriend from my college years (we’ll call her Kathy so that google doesn’t connect her with this story) back in ‘91 or ‘92 after a sour breakup. For a while after that I would hear tales of her from mutual friends. She moved to San Fran, was hanging out with folks we went to school with, had delayed moving on to grad school, things like that. Every so often I’ve googled her to see what she’s up to but she never was much into computers and seems to be almost invisible online. Then a few years ago I noted someone with the same name had accepted a position at a notable educational software publisher. She’s got a fairly uncommon name but there were no pictures so I wasn’t really sure whether it was her or not, but the location and name matched so the chances were fair or better.

A week or so ago I’m driving home and there’s a bit on NPR about research into the use of software in education and who do they interview but…Kathy. Only a sentence or two but it made me laugh to hear it. Funny thing too, it’s been 15 years or more since we’ve spoken  and I couldn’t be sure it was her voice. But it led me to more googling when I got home and I’m pretty sure at this point it was her - the biography matches in terms of post-college stuff. Kudos to her on her 15 minutes of fame. Meanwhile, what are the chances? I listen to NPR for 15 minutes or so each day to and fro work these days, and I just happen to catch a news bit with an ex girlfriend who was dear to my heart.

In the days of my youth…

Published on April 13, 2007 in Vignettes. 2 Comments

…I was a fax machine killer.

I was a pretty impatient guy in my 20’s. For several years early in my career I worked for a small market media company which owned several newspapers and television stations in the northeast. For a couple of years I was helping the company develop an online strategy. This was back before the internet really existed in the public consciousness, and we were negotiating with AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve and so on. I ended up having to do a ton of faxing of materials around, including numerous multipage faxes. The problem was the newspaper whose offices I was housed in had standardized on a hunk of junk fax machine brand. This was back when they cost big dollars. The thing was as large as a microwave, it was probably 10 years old by the time I encountered it, and it was utterly incapable of handling multi-sheet faxes. If you tried, it would invariably skip some of the pages and you would get a call from the recipient asking for the missing page/s. This meant you had to hand feed the thing, page by page. I was sometimes faxing 50 page contracts around, and this drove me nuts - it could take me over an hour to get a fax through on occasion. Couple this with the fact that I worked in a busy ad creation department that was constantly faxing comps around to clients, and you had a line of unhappy folks standing around the fax machine every day.

I tried reasoning with the IT department - this is hardly a cost effective use of my time, a couple of faxes taking this long would already cover the cost of a new machine - but to no avail. I pleaded with my boss - to no avail. For a while I was going to the local kinkos to send the long faxes, but my boss stopped appreciating my expense reports for that and put a stop to it.

I remembered when I had worked in NYC and a sales rep from chicago had sent a 40′ long fax to our thermal paper fax machine, and it had killed the machine and gotten her in hot water with our boss, and this set an evil plan in motion.

I waited one night until my coworkers had all gone home, and filled the paper tray in our fax machine. I  then went to the floor below ours and took a piece of black construction paper, cut it to size, and established it in a loop in the fax machine, then  dialed the number of our fax machine on the floor above. Then I went home.

I came in early the next morning and discovered my plan had worked - our fax machine was dead as a doornail - it could no longer print. It didn’t even take very many pure black pages to kill the print heads. I took the black construction paper out of the machine downstairs, discarded the printouts in our own machine, and called IT. Not long after we had a new, non-thermal fax machine which could send multi-page documents.

Yes, I’m an evil bastard, but I do think it was in the company’s interest that I did this.

I’ll also note that years later when I saw the scene in office space where they take the office fax machine out to a field and beat it to death with baseball bats, I laughed so much I couldn’t breathe. Man, could I ever relate to the scene.

A Soolin scare

Published on October 23, 2006 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

Saturday my dog Soolin and I were out hiking on farmland. I was tossing the ball to her. She came back with the ball and I noted it was fairly bloody, so I called her back and to my shock she was covered in blood down her entire front. I grabbed her and started checking her and realized when I got to her mouth that she was bleeding profusely from a deep cut to her tongue - so deep that it was gushing and she ended up covering me in blood. I was 1/3 of a mile from my house, roughly, and I panicked - how does one apply pressure to a dog’s tongue? Meanwhile, she seemed fine with it and just wanted me to throw the ball some more. I started back towards the house at a jog, constantly having to call at her to follow me since she knew we were headed back towards home and did not want to go. I wasn’t sure exactly what I would do once I got back to the house, but I figured I would think of something on the way.

Fortunately by the time we got back to the house the bleeding had slowed and was no longer gushing. I washed her mouth out and cleaned off her coat with the hose and made her lie down and after a half hour or so things seemed to settle. Talk about a scare though, for maybe 10-15 minutes I was under the impression she might be bleeding to death. The wound did re-open several times over the weekend, but only mild bleeding occurred and it has not re-opened since Sunday morning over breakfast so I think she’s in the clear now.

Great sleepwalking story

Published on October 23, 2006 in Vignettes. 1 Comment

This one’s from my youth. My cousin was a sleepwalker when he was young. When he was about 10, my aunt and uncle were at the neighbors playing cards. They had left the kids home in bed. They were literally about 20 feet away at the next door neighbors house. They had forgotten to put up the sheet of plywood they used to keep my cousin from wandering too far when he sleep walked, however, and when they came home my aunt checked the bedroom and he was not in his bed. Panic ensued and they ran through the house looking for him. They found my cousin in the kitchen, the fruit bin of the fridge pulled out, his rear perched on it, making poopy.

!!!

The doctor had told my aunt not to shock my cousin or violently awaken him if they found him sleepwalking, so they let him conclude his business then shepherded him upstairs and back into his bed. my poor uncle got stuck cleaning up the mess.

This was one of those ‘you can’t let him know you know this story!’ stories when I was a kid, so I never got to tease my poor cousin about the incident, but I laugh every time I think of it.

But…but…but…she only said that because I rejected her!

Published on September 23, 2006 in Vignettes. 5 Comments

Another story, this one from early in my career, that was brought to mind by a recent incident at work. I worked for a media company that had founded a division to do web stuff at the dawn of the general publics’ use of the web (circa 1995). We had awful internal morale issues - lots if bickering, infighting, histrionics, thrown chairs, the works. I was not above participating in those days and was in fact known for my volatile temper, though I never threw anything or otherwise physically expressed my frustration.

(as an aside, I’m now convinced my volatile temper in those days was actually a reflection of the undiagnosed diabetes, with high blood pressure and high blood sugars - basically my system was always running at 130%)

Anyway the company decided to take steps to address these issues, and arranged with the director of HR to facilitate a set of off-site intervention meetings where we would participate in a variety of team building exercises as well as take the time to sort of expose and discuss the core issues that were causing so much tension.

Shortly before one of the first sessions, a coworker had asked me out, the latest in a series of invitations. She had been pursuing me off and on for a couple of months - mostly, at first, with hints (do you like this new movie that’s coming out? Me too!) and then ultimately with a couple of direct invitations. I had blown her off, politely but firmly, with the ‘I don’t date co-workers’ line. I wasn’t attracted to her.

One of the exercises we had to do on this day was a team building exercise that involved a large sheet of paper hung to the wall for each person, divided in half. Half was the good side, and half was the bad side. Each of us had a post-it notepad, and we had to write one good thing and one bad thing about each person in the room and stick it to the appropriate side of their sheet of paper. Once we had all done this, we had to stand before our piece of paper and pluck off the post-its, read them to the room, then discuss them.

When my turn came around, I plucked a bad post-it off and read it to the room. It said (and I can remember this almost verbatim) “David is poorly socialized, has terrible communications skills, fails to behave appropriately in professional circumstances, and should learn to be more respectful of his coworkers.’

!!!

I had to respond to that in front of ~20 people, back when I was a less confident public speaker. Ye gods! I recognized the handwriting of the culprit (of course it was she of the rejected advances) and my first thought was to simply expose her, as inappropriate as that would be (she thinks I behave inappropriately?! wait till she sees this!). But my common sense won the day. It helped that most of it was absurd. While I was known for my volatility, I’ve also always been known for my verbal communication skills, the ability to condense complex technical issues into summaries that non-technical folk can understand, and my willingness to fold to superior logic. I was also president of my frat in college, for crying out loud, and regularly hung out with a significant portion of the staff in the portland bars.

Anyway, I don’t actually think I did a very good job of responding at that time, I was too flustered, but the incident has stuck with me ever since, and instilled in me a very deep suspicion so-called team building exercises (which, as an aside, were an abject failure in this case. The core of the issues had to do with how sales interacted with the production folks. Sales had no technical acumen and we all knew they were, quite literally, stealing from the company through clever sales incentive scams and we had no respect for them professionally or personally. Most of this, of course, was not exposed in these team building exercises. What was one to do? Write ’steals from the company and gets away with it’ on the post-it and stick it to the bad side?).

Imagine his surprise…

Published on September 18, 2006 in General and Vignettes. 0 Comments

I’ll share an amusing story from my youth to make up for the lack of posting here of late.

I worked in a Ground Round restaurant off and on between the ages of 16 and 19 or so, first as a busboy and ultimately as one of the line cooks. Cooking on a line in a busy restaurant can actually be great adrenaline fueled fun fun, especially if you’re young and irresponsible.

One weekend night I was one of the two closing cooks, meaning I had to work until ~1 AM and was responsible for some of the most onerous of the cleaning responsibilities. The worst cleaning job in the kitchen was having to mop behind the line of cooking equipment. You had to pull the equipment away from the wall and sweep then mop up a stretch of tiled floor about 20 feet long and maybe 4 feet deep that was super saturated with kitchen gunk. Sometimes the oil would be a quarter inch thick on that stretch of floor and extremely difficult to sop up. This problem was exacerbated by the fact that since we all hated doing it, we all found schemes to escape having to do it, meaning if you were unlucky you would end up mopping a stretch of floor that hadn’t been cleaned in several days.

On this particular weekend the regional manager had chosen to visit our restaurant. This was a dreaded event as he was wise to our various schemes to avoid cleaning things and he had a volatile temper, often flying off the handle and screaming at us when he caught us not doing our jobs efficiently.

One of the largest pieces of equipment, the broiler where the steaks, burgers, chicken and so on were cooked, had recently been serviced and we had noted that the emergency valve that would cut off the gas supply in the event of a problem had been installed backwards. We were all aware of this and were used to being careful when moving it because of this valve. The gas line it protected was almost wide enough to swallow a baseball.

As soon as the kitchen closed, the district manager came in the back and proceeded to pull the equipment away from the wall to expose our shoddy cleaning, shouting at us as he did so. When he yanked the broiler away from the wall he pulled hard enough that it caused the gas line to disconnect. Normally the safety valve would block the gas from leaking but since it was installed backwards it did not. The district manager was unaware of this fact, while we were.

You never saw two line cooks run so fast. Steve, my partner that night, had the presence of mind to run towards the back door where the emergency gas cutoff valve was - me, being concerned only with self preservation, ran to the bathroom, thinking the thick wooden door would protect me from the inevitable explosion.

Inevitable it was. I heard a muted ‘whooomph!’ and then shouting. When folks started calling my name I poked my head out and there, his bowtie singed, his face lobster red, and his eyebrows and hair singed and smoking, was the district manager, stunned into silence. I lost it, falling into peals of laughter. Steve, who had meanwhile shut the main gas supply off, came to see what had happened and followed my lead, and after a few seconds the two of us ran out the back door of the restaurant, still laughing our heads off.

Amazingly, neither of us lost our jobs. We had filed a repair ticket on the improperly installed safety valve several weeks prior and this plus the fact that Steve’s quick thinking protected against a worse disaster probably saved our jobs. The district manager was taken to the hospital and ended up being only minorly injured, with some serious but not permanently damaging burns on his face and hands. To my surprise this didn’t really alter his behavior towards us or the line - the next time he came in he went through his same procedure, yanking out the equipment and berating us for our inadequate cleaning skills.

I still chuckle every time I remember this incident.

Grandpa Fisher and the ginormous sandwich

Published on June 21, 2006 in General and Vignettes. 0 Comments

Another amusing story about my Grandfather Fisher that will help folks understand from whence my sense of humor came. This one happened when I was 10 or 11 years old. My Grandparents would sometimes take us into a train-themed restaurant in Akron or Canton. I think it was in an old train station and they had extensive train paraphernalia on the walls and an elaborate model railroad installation upstairs. While we were ordering an odd exchange took place between the waitress and my Grandfather that I noticed but couldn’t figure out. The reasons for it became clear when the food arrived at the table, because the server had to have help bringing out a 4′ long sub, the kind of thing you would order to feed a softball team or something, which they plopped down in front of my Grandfather. My sister, cousin and I were incredulous: ‘you going to eat that Grandpa?!? My Grandfather played at being surprised and chagrined and made much hay of being the big man about it an accepting it - ‘I ordered it, I’ll just have to eat it all,’ while my Grandmother gave him grief. The amazing thing is he did eat almost the entire thing, and my Grandfather was not a large man - 5′6″ at most and slender.

Reality intrudes on my virtuality

Published on May 3, 2006 in Vignettes. 2 Comments

So I’m sitting at work, writing up notes for a meeting tomorrow. My office is dark - I much prefer indirect lighting to overhead lighting so I never have it on. I have a dual monitor setup and on the second monitor, I notice what appears to be a bug crawling across my web browser’s screen. I think to myself ‘evil javascript!’ figuring it is some dhtml/javascript deal, and slide the mouse over to the other screen to investigate, trying to click on it, and when that doesn’t work, loading the source code up in another tab to see what’s what. Finding nothing, I launch spybot seek and destroy, worrying that I’ve got something worse going on. As I do this, I observe the bug crawl outside the browser window and suddenly it dawns on me - it’s a real bug! A vile tick, to make matters worse, which I quickly snatch up with a post-it, then seal it to it with some tape.

It turns out that in a dark room a bug crawling on my screen is silhouetted by the back lighting, making for a perfect little optical illusion. I had a good laugh over it, though it still freaks me out that a tick randomly showed up in my office. Soolin hasn’t been with me at the office for several days because of the weather so it seems likely it came from somewhere else.

Grandpa Fisher and lightning

Published on April 27, 2006 in Vignettes. 3 Comments

Here’s my favorite story about my Grandpa Fisher, my Mom’s dad. Through most of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I used to spend at least a week pretty much every summer out in Ohio, and usually longer than that, visiting the extended Hamilton and Fisher clans. I loved going to my Grandfather Fisher’s house. He was a hunter and gun collector and had a pool room upstairs with hundreds of guns mounted on the walls. Most were hunting rifles of one kind or another, but he also had antique weapons and a large handgun collection, and I was allowed to play with them to my heart’s content, while my sister and cousin Heidi were not. Most summers we’d also bring a few out into the back yard and practice shooting. I could almost always bring a pellet rifle down, but occasionally he would also bring down one of the muzzle loaders, or the blunderbuss, or some of the handguns. I even got to fire a .357 once with my Grandfather helping me to keep my arms steady. The girls never got to shoot unless my Aunt Sandy was around and got on my Grandfather’s case, and even then it wasn’t a sure thing. Such was the generational gap - my Grandfather had been raised in a different time and with different rules.

Anyway one summer when I was in my mid-teens I was in the yard shooting at cans with a pellet rifle and thunderstorms began to roll in. This area of Ohio (Akron-Canton , in the Portage lakes region - basically the northeastern quarter of the state) was prone to violent thunderstorms and even hail in the summers. My grandfather asked me to stop shooting and come up on the porch but I resisted, asking him if I could wait until the rain actually arrived. My Grandfather got cross and told me to come on up before I got hit by lightning, then joked about me with a lightning rod (the gun) in my hands. When I kept arguing he complained that the gun would rust what with the moisture and insisted I come up onto the porch, but allowed that I could continue shooting from the porch if I moved the targets in closer, which I then did.

The rest of the family was sitting around on the porch and I took a seat and started shooting as the thunderstorm rolled in. It was a powerful storm and pretty soon it was coming down hard and lightning was cracking, and my grandfather joked again about how I was a lightning rod and was going to get electrocuted. I said something mocking about it and kept shooting.

Suddenly as I lined up another shot a huge bang went off seemingly right at my feet, and I screamed ‘holy SHIT!’ and threw the gun out into the rain, thinking I had just been struck by lightning. My feet also felt burned. Meanwhile everyone on the porch had begun laughing and I came to realize that my grandfather had tossed a lit cherry bomb at my feet as I had been lining up the shot. I had never sworn in front of any of the Ohio relatives before and this was half the joke to them. Meanwhile the old coot had scorched my feet with the damned thing, but even so I also started to laugh. He had gotten me but good.

Another good Grannie story

Published on April 20, 2006 in Vignettes. 3 Comments

So I’ve been posting reminisces about my grandparents lately. Here’s one of my favorite ones about Grannie.

A couple of years ago I moved to Saratoga Springs NY, and shortly after I went to a family barbecue at my Aunt Melissa and Uncle Danny’s house, and Grannie was there. It was one of the few times I had seen her in years and years. At one point most folks went outside - I think the kids were roasting marshmallows or something - but in any case Grannie stayed inside and I sat there shooting the breeze with her, trying to get a sense of what she was doing those days. The fact that she was still driving came up, and given her age it was a little surprising, and I said so. She got a twinkle in her eye in response and said ‘yes, and I don’t use the brakes!’ I gradually got out of her that she would leave her house, head to her hairdressers, which was down a steep hill, and try not to use the brakes on her car because she enjoyed zooming as fast as gravity would take her down the hill.

!!!

I thought this was pretty funny. Picture a woman in her 80’s with a grin on her face zooming down a hill and maybe you’ll see the humor. But I also think it speaks to something I said about Grannie in one of my other stories about her - she was still enjoying life, and getting a kick out of it, at her age, something which is often not true of the very elderly.

She slimed me!

Published on March 30, 2006 in Vignettes. 2 Comments

I told the story recently of the passing of my Grandmother and it occurred to me afterwords that while I’ve done a pretty good job of honoring my promise to my Grandmother Fisher to tell the stories of my Grandfather’s life (and subsequently of her life) to my friends over the years, I’ve not recorded them here. So here’s one of my favorites about my Grandmother Fisher. A mischievous sense of humor tends to run in my family, to some extent on both sides but especially on the Fisher side, and this is an example of that.

For many years over the course of my childhood my sister Kirsten and I would travel to Ohio for a week or two each summer to spend time with our grandparents and extended family. Both sides of the Family, Hamilton and Fisher, had their roots in Ohio - the Fishers in Akron and the Hamiltons in Wooster. We’d divide time between the families.

One year when we went out, when I was around 11 or 12, the Fishers picked us up at the airport and brought us back to their house. When we got to the house my Grandmother began to complain that she wasn’t feeling well and disappeared into another room while my Grandfather brought us into the den and settled us into easy chairs. As we chatted my Grandmother came in. Suddenly she clutched her hand to her chest and exclaimed something about really not feeling well, then leaned over and upchucked into my lap.

!!!

I looked down to find this large glistening mass of putrid green… stuff. It looked more like snot than anything else. I nearly leapt out of my chair, but meanwhile I noticed both my Grandparents were cracking up, exclaiming about the look on my face and how they’d pulled one over on me and so on. I prodded the stuff in my lap and discovered it was cool to the touch and concluded that whatever it was it wasn’t harmful.

Long story short, it was a kids toy that I had never heard of. I think it was called Slime, though I can’t recall. I do remember that it came in a small trash can, and that the following school year it was all the rage and ended up being banned from our classroom because of all the hi-jinks folks were pulling with it.

My Grandparents Fisher were fond of pranks of this nature. This is my second favorite of all the ones they ever pulled, and the best one my Grandmother pulled.

My favorite Granny story - the birth of Lindsey

Published on March 30, 2006 in Vignettes. 0 Comments

So as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I’ll be posting stories about my grandmother by way of remembrance. Here’s my favorite. My youngest sister Lindsey was born in our house on Seaview Avenue with the help of my Grandmother and a midwife. It had become clear that Lindsey was on the way late one winter afternoon and the family was gathered around waiting for this to happen with some anticipation. I played missile command on my Atari 2600 for hours as I waited, and ultimately ended up going to bed. This birthing business takes too long, I remember thinking. Late that night or very early the next morning came an insistent tapping at my door. It was Granny, as excited as a kid on Christmas, come to wake me up and summon me to watch the birth of my sister. It suddenly occurred to me, sleepy eyed and groggy, that I wanted no part of watching a birth take place, especially not one involving my mother, and I began trying to beg off. There was this wonderful moment of a clash of emotions between my grandmother and I - she simultaneously so excited that she seemed about to bounce out of her shoes and at the same time crestfallen that I wasn’t sharing her excitement and interest, and me, embarrassed and sheepish and trying to mask it behind a sort of sleepy irritation.

Granny ultimately gave up and me and bounced back upstairs after admonishing me for passing on the chance to witness something of such significance to the family. At a guess, this incident barely registered with her, but it’s stuck with me all these years. It is the only time I can recall seeing Granny positively giddy with excitement over something.

The dumbest system administrator ever

Published on December 16, 2005 in Vignettes. 1 Comment

I shall name no names, nor will I say at which job I encountered this, to protect the not so innocent and the more than slightly dumb. At one of my places of employment we ran Apple Xserves. I’m not a big fan of them, but whatever, they’ve done their job more or less. Anyway at one point we had installed a new machine in the racks and I was busily installing its software layer. I noticed performance was pretty sluggish but didn’t give it a lot of thought, I figured I would get to the bottom of it as I went through the install process. As I walked out to lunch I noticed the screen of the laptop of a coworker of mine and one of the main system admins, a brand new laptop, running an opengl screensaver at an atrocious framerate. I made an offhand comment about poor performance and he got a gleam in his eye. ‘You know what that is? come here!’ He proceeded to show me how he had configured our brand new xserve to run an opengl screensaver, then connected apple’s remote management tool to the machine across the network, and he was streaming the video from the xserve to his laptop.

!!!

Nevermind the overhead of running an opengl screensaver on a server, which is bad enough, he compounded it by some incalculable order of magnitude by streaming it across the network. This fellow was the main web systems administrator and this was not an issue of him thinking he would just experiment with a new box - he was surprised when I started berating him for wasting system and network resources. It hadn’t occurred to him that these might be issues.

He lost access to the server that day, right after lunch.