Pick Up The Phone? Never!

If you called me, you'll know I'm not crazy about answering phones, so please don't be annoyed when my answering machine screens your call.  Oh, don't get me wrong, I like the technology and love my 3G iPhone (What's that Precious? Soon,Precious. Soon, we will have the new 4G, my Precious. Soon...)  It's just that I don't like phone technology ALL the time in my face, specifically those aural parts of my face called ears.  

It's nothing personal, or rather it is something personal with me.  As the day wears on, my ears "get tired" and I prefer quiet and/or solitude.  I can't say for sure, but I think this all happened as a result of my being stationed on an aircraft carrier for about 3+ years and constantly hearing noise - aircraft engines, steam catapults, and all sorts of pumps and air circulating fans. All the time, everywhere you went, 24-7 unless I was off the ship, of course.


I know for a fact my hearing degraded during those years as I had to take a hearing test both when I enlisted and when I mustered out and I could see by the response graphs I noticeably lost some frequency response. And just recently I went to have my hearing tested again as I noticed there are times I don't quite get what people are saying, especially if there is a lot of background voices like at a party, or family gatherings.  What the doc told me was while I am indeed getting worse in the mid-range frequencies (which just happens to be were human voices are), but this time it's nothing unusual. It's just age related, something I'm getting used to hearing - when I can that is. Those little cilia in your ears just plumb wear out.

So all this leads to my phone story. When I worked as a Mechanical Liaison engineer at Tacoma Boatbuilding Company (TBC), I was in a double wide trailer parked right out on the docks, next to the ships under construction. Inside it was an open trailer with about 4-6 desks, filing cabinets, and drafting boards and I shared it with about 4-5 other guys. Our job was to be johnny-on-the-spot fixers, re-designing and re-releasing engineering to fix problems with how something was originally designed, or how someone ended up building it. Either way, since the problem was suddenly discovered and was holding up further production which could get quite costly, it just as suddenly had to be fixed.  The result was if you were a good liaison engineer, the build shops loved you and made a point to seek you out as you could literally mean the difference between that craft making money or not as the actual labor vs. planned labor was reconciled weekly. If you were  bad, well, those same crafts saw to it that you didn't last long. It was the law of the jungle out in the shipyard.  At the time this story takes place, we all good and knew it, so we were cocky, and it was about as close to one can get to what one reads about professional teams' locker rooms.  Oh yeah, the testosterone flowed in that trailer, baby. 

And so did the phone calls. It is not an exaggeration to say they rang constantly. The trailer had only two phones - one on each end - for all of us.  One was tied into the existing TBC phone network and the other sat in a corner on my desk since I was the newbie engineer and had to give up the precious desk real estate.  This phone was a recently added line with a completely different exchange that turned out to be the old number of an bar nearby that fairly recently went out of business. We found that out after weeks of being puzzled as the why we were getting so many wrong numbers around lunch time that would hang up as soon as we said "Tacoma Boat". Finally, someone heard the bar name and had the bright idea to look it up in an old phone book, and sure enough the number was there. Hey, I told you we were good as this was a good 10-15 years before reverse lookup on the web.


Anyway, this started a string of pulling phone pranks. We all started answering the phone pretending to be the bar taking orders for lunch, checking to see if "Fred was there", etc. It seemed like fun at the time and certainly broke up an otherwise hectic day, until one day I sort of broke the mold when someone called for a co-worker of mine who I'll call Jim.  


"Ski speaking", I answered. The guy one the other end asked to if there was a Jim at this number.


"Jim, call for you", I yelled across the trailer. Who is it? he wanted to know.


Now I had no idea who the caller was as he didn't identify himself, so I decided to make something up and pull Jim's leg because as mild and unassuming his demeanor was, he was also probably the one guy more than any other who got a kick taking the false lunch orders and imagine what those unsuspecting patrons thought when the pulled up to the defunct bar. Knowing this, I tried to think of the most outrageous thing to startle the other co-workers.


"He didn't give his name (true), but he said something about you messing around with his wife!"  That last part was totally untrue. Or so I thought.


Jim looked at me strangely as he crossed the trailer to answer the call while I noticed that my joke didn't get any attention form the other co-workers. Either they were all too busy, or the joke just bombed. Either way, I was disappointed enough to forget about it and go back to my work while Jim stood by my desk talking in a hushed voice. 


After a few minutes, as he hung up the phone Jim looked nervously around the trailer and leaning over my desk so no one else would hear he said:
"I would appreciate it if you would keep the nature of this call confidential, Ski".


"Wha?? I don't know what you're talking about, Jim."


"That call. See I meant this woman in a bar a couple weeks ago, and ..."


At first I thought Jim was turning the prank back on me, but no. He did meet a gal who never let on she was married, dated her a couple of times (and lord only knows what else) and the hubby called Jim to tell him it was over.  I could see by how Jim wasn't opening up the conversation to the other guys in the trailer and foregoing the comedic effect of pranking me with my own prank that he was serious and I finally believed him.


And try as I might, Jim never believed that I had just made it up on the spot and had know nothing previously. If he thought I was a jerk for yelling out a statement that was a one-in-a-centillion truth, he never said. But he was always grateful for keeping my silence. Me, ever since then I always answer the phone the right way. 

One Mystery Solved! Sort Of!

I love it when weird things happen to me. Take today, for example.

Because of some freeway construction I often decide to take an alternate route home rather than do the "stop-and-don't-go-far" thing due to traffic backing up.  Specifically, on my way home to University Place, I get off I-5 southbound at another exit rather than the SR-16 westbound exit undergoing some serious and long overdue re-configuring.  I like using S. 38th as it offers several different streets to chose from, and which one I choose on any particular day is pretty much a random guess based on which one I perceive to have the lightest volume of traffic.  Since it's all pretty much guess work and totally unscientific, I often wondered which way was actually the fastest. I mean my GPS can tell me which is shortest, but that's not always the fastest.  But if I learned one thing in my year long Relativity course in college (yes, I'm that geeky), it was that "fast" is a relative term, and in this case, one with just too many variables (time of day, day of the week, weather, etc.), to account for, so I never actually tried doing any sort of actual measurements.

Well, today was different and I'm closer to knowing the answer. Deciding to take the same alternate exit, S. 38th, a Honda with Arizona plates happened to pull right in front of me and was still in front of me as we approached the red light at the end of the exit ramp.  That's were we parted ways with me taking the empty right turn only lane to go to Costco to get some gas, while the Arizona Honda stayed in the exit lane to continue west down S.38th.

Now these times are estimates only, but I figure it only took me a minute or so to get to Costco where I had to wait perhaps 2-3 minutes before it was my turn to use the pump, and another 3-4 minutes to actually fill up my car, pay and leave via the back exit to Cedar to eventually turn onto Center street. I estimate the entire side trip took no longer than 7-8 minutes tops.

Then as I approached the red light at Union and Center, low and behold who should happen to be already there stopped right in front of me? The Arizona Honda! I recognized the license plate immediately. It was like we planned it, both agreeing to conduct the very experiment I often wondered about.

Now of course I have no idea where she went from the last time I saw her on S.38th waiting for the light to change while I passed her to take that free right turn.  True, there are other stores and strip malls in the area and it's conceivable she could have stopped to run a short errand just like I did. And I do have to admit I find it a little hard to believe it took her those 7-8 minutes to wind her way to get to the same intersection the very same time I did.  But then again knowing the amount of traffic in that area at 3:00 PM and how long the red lights are, I suppose it's possible to lose that amount of time, especially if you caught each light.

Anyway, I guess I never know for sure as the odds of this happening again are probably as long as the odds that SR-16 exit work will finish before I retire. But until it is finished, I think I know which alternate way I'll probably be going more than others. After all, it's just a matter of relativity.

This is your brain on waffles

I was listening to this guy on NPR talking about the brain and how it prioritizes our memories. Basically, whether you are aware of it or not, you remember things that are important either to your body or your mind.

Your mind, I thought? What the heck that does that mean? I can understand the body thing because we all have this amazing array of interactive senses aiding our survival, so you only touch a glowing burner on a stove once. (Unless you’re my first son, who had to do it twice before he learned, but that’s another story.) 

But there’s no pain or sensory system in brain, otherwise we’d be overwhelmed with input and become non-functional with self paralysis. So this got me thinking - is the mind actually aware of itself?  I immediately thought of one of my favorite jokes by Emo Philips: “I used to think the brain was the most important organ and then I thought, sure, look who’s telling me that!”

Anyway, what the speaker was referring to was we remember things that happen so as we will alter our behaviors to act in accordance with whatever image we have our ourselves. The example he used was how we tend to forget, or at least downplay, positive things that happened to us, while we usually have no trouble recalling the negative things. Especially if we were the cause of them, like embarrassing ourselves. And as soon as he said that, one incident that I have never forgotten came back to mind, which is to really say it came to the front of my mind.

I can’t remember exactly how old I was, probably like 8 or 9, but suffice to say I was immature enough not to know how to respond to some really stupid comments and unfair accusations from my friends and their mother about - brace yourself - my eating a truck waffle. Yes, you read that right, a truck waffle!

See, when I was a kid on Regent Road in Cleveland there was a guy who had a waffle truck. He would slowly drive by, banging a bell with a metal ladle, stopping to sell these delicious Belgian waffles made right there on the spot for a nickel.  Now that was a lot of money for a waffle (at least that’s what my Mom always told me) so it was a real treat to have one of those, and like everyone else who did, I savored every bite whenever I was lucky enough to have one.

One beautiful, sunny, summer morning, found me just so fortunate, but Lenny and Kenny, the kids about my age that lived across the street from me, and their much older cousin were not. (The cousin's real name is forever lost in some unconnected neurons, but probably was Kathy. In my neighborhood, 8 out of 10 girls were named Kathy, with the other two spelling it C-A-T-H-Y). They also asked their moms, but were told they couldn’t have one as it was ‘too close to lunch”. It was clearly one of those BS mom answers, and we all knew it. I seem to recall I sold my mom on me getting a waffle primarily by pointing out it was only like 10:00 AM and promising to eat all my lunch.  

Now,  the big rules in our neighborhood were the “gee, that’s tough” and "just out of luck" rules - i.e., if everyone but you was going to the movies, or down to the corner store to buy a bag of chips and a bottle of pop, or doing anything that you couldn’t for whatever reason, well, gee, that was tough and you were just out of luck. But you never committed the social faux pax of asking, or worse begging, to be included. Protocol was once you said you didn’t have the money, if the gang wanted to treat you, one or more would bring it up by inviting you along anyway with the clear understanding as to under what limits. Yes, we’ll pay your way in the movie, but no snacks, and you have to pay us back. Or Eddy will share his chips, but not his pop. Cyril will give you a couple of sips of his, no chugs and no "lipping". ("Lipping" was to completely encircle the bottle neck with your entire mouth as if it your were sucking on a  popsicle. Proper manners dictated you could only place the bottle to your lips like you were about to play a trumpet.) 


If you were asked and more importantly willing to subjugate yourself to the clearly defined lower status, that was OK. But you never dared to ask yourself. You could make any number of desperate “monkey faces” clearly indicating your desires, but vocalize it outright? Never.

So cousin Kathy not being from “The Hood” but from some farm in Pennsylvania, which was weird enough on it own right, violated these rules by coming right out and asking me to share my waffle.  After recovering from the shock of even being asked in the first place, I quickly realized that if I was to share, I would have to share equally with all three of them, leaving me with only one corner section. Now this was just a standard size Belgian waffle, nothing special about it other than how good it was. Sharing it would mean paying a nickel to have just a few measly bites. That made no economic sense, and being local kids, Lenny and Kenny knew it.  So I did what any normal kid in the same situation would do - I pretended not to hear and stuffed it all in my face, just about choking to death.  Once I regained my breath and composure, viola! Problem solved. Now there was nothing to share. Then in order to get rid of any evidence whatsoever that I even had a waffle in the first place, I wadded up the thin tissue paper wrapper it came in and stuffed that down “the sewer”, which was really just a big storm drain in the center of the brick street with a perforated manhole cover.

Wiping my hands across my powdered sugar encrusted mouth, I tried grinning innocently, but with my full mouth still chewing causing my black horn-rimmed glasses to bounce up and down (think Buddy Holly, but not as cool - yet), I probably looked just like the geek I felt. Now I can’t exactly remember how it happened, but I'm pretty certain cousin Kathy being older and a "foreigner" felt enabled to express her anger at me by starting some pretty mean teasing and taunting, calling me a hog-faced piggy. Lenny and Kenny, probably just as mad because I didn’t go along with the sharing suggestion and feeling more loyalty to their cousin, joined right in. They must have been loud because soon after it started Lenny and Kenny’s mom, Mrs. P, came outside to see what was going on.

“He didn’t share any of his waffle”, they all said.

Big deal, I thought. I expected Mrs. P to indirectly support/validate me by sushing them up to mind their own business.  You see, the Golden Rule for Regent Road moms was not “Do Unto Others”, but “Mind Your Own Business”. And that went double for their kids. Triple for neighbors and husbands.

“Well, he’s just selfish”, she replied much to my horror, almost as much because not only did she violate the Golden Rule, but she was damn straight. I was totally selfish. It was a truck waffle for Pete's sakes, I thought of saying, but instead I just cast my gaze down as my I felt my face slowly redden.

“And he’s a litterbug. He threw his garbage down the sewer”, said a piercing girl's voice. At that moment, I hated cousin Kathy like I hated no one else.  What the hell is she doing up here from Pennsylvania in the first place? 

“Well, he shouldn’t have done that. What if he causes the sewer to back up and flood the street?”, Mrs P offered in some strain of ridiculous mom logic that some how made sense to them, but only confused us kids.  As much as that rebuke stung as it was just piling on encouraging Lenny, Kenny and cousin Kathy to chime up and humiliate me even more, I didn’t hate Mrs. P like I hated cousin Kathy. She was just doing her job as a mother I figured, which was to exaggerate the consequences of any unwanted act any kid ever did so if we couldn't understand it, at least we didn't forget it.  I can remember looking at the sewer with my already downcast eyes and thinking to myself, that frigging sewer is wide enough for a guy to go down it for crying out loud. How's my little wad of tissue paper going to plug it up? 

But being a kid growing up on Regent Road, any such courage to speak up was beaten out of me long before, so I just stood there and took it, totally unaware the neurons in my brain were permanently mapping themselves so I would never, ever forget how a sunny, summer morning that started out so wonderful suddenly turned out to be one of the most miserable in my short existence. 

Really. I never felt so ashamed or humiliated. Or confused. All I did was eat a waffle and yet they made me feel like I was the scum my discarded wad of tissue paper was resting on in the sewer. 


Oh well. One the bright side, at least because of that incident, my neurons mapped themselves so I’ll also never forget the taste of those truck waffles! 

Burning Whatever Is Idiotic

You probably heard about that guy in Florida who wants to burn the Qur'an on the 9/11.  I'm not really going to comment on that as anyone who knows me also knows what I think about that, but I mention it because it got me thinking about one of those "Ah ha!" moments we all have were we suddenly mapped out a point on our moral compass.

It was back in 1966 when John Lennon's comment about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus hit the US media just before a tour of theirs.  There was the understandable outrage as back in the 60's, people just were supposed to KNOW their place. Especially young kids from Liverpool who were suddenly getting very rich and very influential. They especially should KNOW their place, since they were earning in about a week what the average American earned in a year or two.  (Note: The minimum wage in 1966 was $1.25/hour for a weekly wage of $50.00.  And the Beatles were making 39 cents per record sale.  So to make 50 bucks they only had to sell 128 records. Rubber Soul, which came out in early 1966, sold 1.2 million in just the US alone in the first 9 days after its release. That's a pretty big chunk of the American dream.)

Anyway, I first heard about the record burning while listening to my "pocket" size transistor radio. It was a "pocket" sized radio alright (think in terms of the first cell phones) - as long as I was wearing my Osh-Gosh bib overalls complete with side loop for hanging my hammer my mother once bought me much to my horror, but that's another story. Because that was the first I heard of burning records I asked my good buddy Eddy what was going on and he explained to me about Lennon's remark in some rather prejudicial terms as he was a bit more religious than I  - probably because his home life was a hell of lot worse than mine. More on that also some other time.  Since Eddy was outraged, not wanting to be different I was outraged as well.  We talked briefly about burning our Beatles records as well, but it was an idle threat and we both knew it. We worked too hard delivering newspapers to get the money to buy those albums. Besides, once the Rolling Stones came out with their stuff, I sort of realized that I didn't have to like the group to like their music.

And I wasn't really in a rage. Things like that just didn't get me worked up. I had grown up hearing about how the Nazis burned books and even without understanding the underlying terror, it just seemed so pointless to me. I mean so you burn a book. Big deal.  If it's one I read, I still know what was in it, and it's not like you can't go some place else and get another copy. And while I did think JL's remark as first explained to me was kind of arrogant and egotistical and was a bit disappointing, later that afternoon while delivering The Cleveland Press on my paper route when I actually got to read the Lennon article for myself, I saw that JL was basically correct in what he said.  I won't go into too many details as you can check it out for yourself, but what he said was what what everyone was saying at that time, including TIME itself with it's famous IS GOD DEAD? cover.  It was his opinion that Christianity was decline, and that in terms of current popularity, the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. And guess what? They were.  That's what got everyone so mad. Lennon had dared to say what everyone really knew. So they were going to strike back by burning the Beatles' records.  And that's when I had my "ah ha" moment.

See, Lennon's comment was based on how The Beatles records were selling so much world wide. And here was a group that was going to burn their records. Well, in order to burn a Beatles' record, first you have to buy a Beatles record.  What a joke!  Those who wanted to protest how popular the Beatles were first had to go and help establish their popularity. I think I read in one of the books written about the Beatles, that they themselves appreciated this irony.

Okay, Uncle, I Give, Allee-Allee-In Free!

See those phrases?  Just my way of saying I surrender.  Per usual, I decided to catch up to others in my family and start my own blog. Kind of like how I lived with them - faking like I was in front leading all the way when actually they were dragging me down a path of becoming someone else.  I must say, however, they did a good job. The who I am now is a bit better than the who I was. Which is just the opposite of The Who. And the Stones for that matter.


As for the blog, I can't tell you what to expect, except I like collecting and retelling stories,(and re-retelling them, hence my wife C helped me with the name of my blog). If we still lived in hunter/gather societies, I'd probably be the story teller, except not the really good one. I'd be his opening act, warming up the clan, making sure that compared to me he'd still sound good even if he bombed. My problem is, while I really do enjoy all that folk lore and stuff, it's my nature to slip in a few scientific facts here and there, like what really causes thunder.


Also, like Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, I have developed over the years a set of rules that I think everyone should live by, or at least they should be aware of them so they can feel decidedly guilty when not following them.  As such, I think it only fair that I also point out to others when people don't follow these rules. 


In my defense I will say that I don't nearly have as many rules as Larry seems to have. But other than that, we are alike is many respects. We both have about the same sense of humor in that we are both keen observers of life's ironies. His because he's Jewish, and mine because I'm registering right there with him on the Guilt-O Meter. I'm Polish Catholic.


Or was anyway. 


I mean the Catholic part. Try as I might, stopping from being Polish isn't as easy as just not going to church anymore. 


OK. I think that's enough. Besides, anyone who made it this far, deserves a break...